None of this was controversial. The ex-judge was Tom Bathurst, most recently chief justice of New South Wales. His confidant was the state’s attorney-general, Michael Daley. And the high-profile figure was Kathleen Folbigg. Twenty years after being convicted of suffocating her four children, she was released from a Grafton prison.

Asked when Bathurst’s actual report would come out, Daley replied, “Without giving away any confidences, I think it would be appropriate to say that it will be weeks and not months.” The report was published last week, more than five months after Folbigg’s release.

Bathurst is the latest in a very lengthy string of judges who’ve ruled on Folbigg’s murder convictions. Six appeal judges, rejecting her first two appeals, all expressly said they agreed with the jury’s verdict. Three High Court judges (who had all once sat on the same appeals court) refused a further appeal, adding that the prosecution evidence was strong.

Just four years ago, in a different official inquiry, a former judge (previously head of a different New South Wales court) not only declared Folbigg guilty as charged but said that the further evidence he had heard “makes her guilt of these offences even more certain.” Two years ago, yet another appeal panel found ample basis for their former colleague’s ruling.

That’s twelve judges and one former one who’ve ruled Folbigg’s conviction safe, with no dissenters or doubters. Until now.

As he foreshadowed to Daley, Bathurst has told the state governor (a former head of the appeals court who had already pardoned Folbigg) that “there is reasonable doubt as to Ms Folbigg’s guilt” of each of her alleged crimes.

What created the doubt, according to Bathurst’s report, was new evidence that emerged just as the previous inquiry reported. Rather than supporting the finding that Kathleen Folbigg smothered her children, it showed that her two daughters shared a gene that could kill them. Other new evidence firmed up the likelihood that one of her son’s multiple afflictions also had natural causes. Bathurst accepted most, but not all, of this expert evidence.

Also presented was fresh psychological evidence about how to read diaries written by people under stress. Folbigg had written, for instance, of her husband’s “morbid fear” of their fourth child dying, “Well I know there’s nothing wrong with her. Nothing out of ordinary any way. Because it was me not them,” adding “I’ve learnt once it’s getting to me to walk away… With Sarah [her third child] all I wanted was her to shut up. And one day she did.” Bathurst said that these, and similar entries, were “evidence of self-blame” and concluded that the diaries contained no “reliable admissions of guilt.”

But it’s not only evidence that changes with time. As academic Emma Cunliffe details in her masterwork on Folbigg’s case, shared assumptions about multiple infant deaths have shifted with the decades. Once, those deaths were attributed to sleep apnoea, but then New York police investigated a family whose experience had been presented as key evidence of that theory and came away with the mother’s confession to five infant murders. Unsurprisingly, maternal suffocation became the preferred go-to, until the doctor who coined the term “Munchausen syndrome by proxy” was disgraced for giving bad statistical evidence in homicide trials. Folbigg’s misfortune was to be tried just before genes’ and trauma’s stars rose as explanation for such family tragedies.

Another change is simply that Folbigg’s trial is now much less recent. As anger, shock and memories recede and anticipated confirmations — confessions, revelations, similar cases — fail to materialise, space opens up for murderers to be unmade in the public’s mind. (Folbigg has long had champions including, startlingly, Alan Jones.)

Given the myriad possible explanations for the late turnabout in Folbigg’s case, I’m content to put aside the less palatable ones — medical fashion, malleable opinion, multiple wrong judges or jurors, or error on the part of Bathurst himself — and pin it all on the fresh evidence.

But there’s a further uncomfortable fact that Bathurst, Daley and others never mention, and that I’m not content to let slide: Kathleen Folbigg was unfairly tried in 2003, something New South Wales’s judges have known perfectly well for at least seventeen years.

Kathleen Folbigg’s two-month trial nearly collapsed in its second week. The trouble started when a new lawyer named Annabel dropped by to watch the proceedings and immediately recognised one of the jurors. She phoned a friend to confirm that her boyfriend was on the panel and then asked, “Did you know that was the case I was working on?” Annabel had done her student training at legal aid and had helped to prepare Folbigg’s defence.

It belatedly dawned on her that her phone call may have worsened the situation. Still worse, her friend had been part of her uni study group and may have been there when she described her work on the case. Worst of all, she might have told the group her personal view: that Folbigg was guilty as charged but shouldn’t be jailed. She promptly told the trial lawyers everything.

Folbigg’s prosecutor was dismissive — jurors often hear others’ takes in high-profile cases — but the defence fretted that Annabel’s opinions may be given particular weight. The judge, loathe to act on mere possibilities, opted to put the juror on the stand. He testified that he knew Annabel and about her phone call to his girlfriend, but, asked whether he had heard any of the lawyer’s opinions about the case, replied, “None whatsoever.” He was returned to the jury room with instructions to discuss the case with no one, including his girlfriend.

Justice Graham Barr made many decisions in 2003 that have aged well. Crucially, he barred all of the medical experts from opining on the likelihood of four natural infant deaths in a single family, restricting them to discussing each child individually. Bathurst ruled that Barr’s take matched the state-of-the-art medical thinking two decades later, and disclaimed the stance of then prosecutor Mark Tedeschi, who likened the defence case to a person being “hit by lightning four times.”

Tedeschi repeatedly tried to inform the jury of another startling fact about Kathleen Folbigg: that her father had killed her mother. The prosecutor initially said that it “provided an explanation for why the accused may have smothered her children.” Later, he claimed that it explained how Folbigg’s self-description in her diary as “my father’s daughter” amounted to a confession to the murders. Finally, he argued that the jury needed to know the history to understand her discussions about it with her husband and, later, the police.

Barr knocked back each of these attempts in turn, explaining that “the risk of misuse of the evidence is so great that I doubt whether any direction can obviate it.” This year, Folbigg’s ex-husband Craig complained that her troubled childhood was scarcely mentioned in Bathurst’s inquiry. He urged that it should be put in the report to the governor as evidence of his former wife’s possible inherited traits, mental illness and consciousness of guilt. Bathurst’s report dismissed this “rank speculation,” instead listing Craig’s unreliable trial testimony as a further reason to doubt the jury’s verdict.

It is a tribute to Barr that the courts have identified only one mistake he made: giving Folbigg too harsh a sentence. On the morning of 17 February 2005, the first three judges to review her case upheld her conviction but lowered her sentence from Barr’s forty years to thirty, leaving her eligible for parole in 2028. “Any person who was properly informed, sensible and thoughtful” would see how her “tragic background” — which effectively left her an orphan — “explains to some extent, although it does not excuse to any extent, how the crimes came to be committed.”

Barr’s excellent judging was something of a misfortune for Folbigg. A fair trial means a fair verdict. Or so it seemed that morning. That afternoon, Annabel emailed legal aid with some bad news about Folbigg’s jury.

Two brief court judgements are the only public insight into the flurry of behind-the-scenes events kicked off by Annabel’s email from early 2005 to late 2007. Even the judgements that emerged are unusual, because courts typically cannot rule on evidence that emerges after (here, hours after) a convicted offender loses her first appeal. Bizarrely, a missing staple on her court file allowed an exception in Folbigg’s case.

Thanks to the missing staple, we know that Annabel’s email recounted how a juror she “knew” had told her that “one of the jurors had researched Kathy’s history etc on the internet” during the trial. A year-long court-ordered investigation followed. Thanks to the rules protecting jurors and their deliberations, the only public outcomes of that investigation are terse summaries of “two instances of potential irregularity in the conduct of the jury trial.”

One involved the fact that some of the infants’ bodies were warm when paramedics arrived. The jurors were curious about how long bodies stay warm, and one asked a nurse friend. Such inquiries are forbidden, but the court ruled that, luckily, what the jury was told — that bodies stay warm for quite a while — helped the defence.

The other irregularity was far more serious. A juror googled “Kathleen Folbigg,” read “several related sites” and told others what they said: that Folbigg’s father killed her mother when Folbigg was an infant. This discussion happened early in the trial, while Tedeschi tried and Barr refused to let the jurors know this very fact, blissfully unaware that their debate was moot.

The jury verdict would also be moot unless the court was “satisfied” that what the jury discovered had not affected their verdict. And here’s where the story took another turn.

Chief judge Peter McClellan explained the appeals judges’ take in a single paragraph:

Even though the appellant was the child of a person who killed another I do not believe there was any likelihood that a juror would reason that it was more likely that the appellant would kill her own children. The killing of a spouse may tragically occur in circumstances of the breakdown of a relationship or be occasioned by temporary loss of control accompanied by a violent and fatal act. The circumstances and motive for the killing are likely to be quite different from those which will exist if a mother has killed her own children. There could be no suggestion that the killing of the appellant’s mother by her father indicated any tendency in the appellant to kill her own children. In my judgment the knowledge obtained by the juror did not lead to a miscarriage of justice.

Judges Carolyn Simpson and soon-to-be-High-Court-justice Virginia Bell agreed without comment. The panel, satisfied that the juror’s research hadn’t affected the jury’s verdict, dismissed Folbigg’s second appeal and caused her to spend sixteen more years in prison.

There is no nice way to say this: what the court says here is wrong. It’s possible that the sheriff’s investigation turned up a quite different reason to be satisfied that the jury’s verdict was unaffected by the learning about Folbigg’s childhood, but the reason the court gave — that the jury would have simply shrugged and ignored it — is ridiculous.

Don’t just take my word for it. Take the word of prosecutor Mark Tedeschi, who argued that the jury could use the information to apply “the attachment theory, which is that children who have gone through the sort of early life that this accused went through may have difficulty themselves bonding with their own children.” Or trial judge Graham Barr, who acknowledged that the family history had “substantial” value in interpreting Folbigg’s diary, but that that still did not outweigh “the danger of unfair prejudice.”

Or why not appeal judge Peter McClellan? A decade after ruling on Folbigg, he headed the royal commission into institutional child abuse. There, he wrote eloquently about how “adverse childhood experiences can negatively influence a person’s emotional, social and cognitive development.” But he also bemoaned the “misconception… that victims of child sexual abuse go on to sexually offend against children themselves,” a conception sadly voiced by some victims when they privately confessed their own crimes to the commission.

My point, of course, isn’t that Folbigg’s history casts light on her guilt or innocence. Rather, it’s the possibility that one or more jurors may have seen such a link themselves, much as her ex-husband and others did. Or, as Barr feared, that one or more of them might have somehow irrationally judged her for her father’s crimes. I struggle to imagine why the appeal judges couldn’t imagine these possibilities.

Indeed, I have a further, more speculative worry, based on what Folbigg wrote in her diary between the death of her third child and the conception of her fourth:

I’m ready to continue my family time now. Obviously, I’m my father’s daughter. But I think losing my temper stage and being frustrated with everything has passed.

Craig Folbigg, the police and Tedeschi all thought the middle sentence was a confession to a homicidal temper. Barr ordered that it be whited out in the jury’s copy of the diary, and belatedly told Tedeschi not to mention the word “But” either.

But I fear that the jury could well have puzzled out what was behind the white-out, for two reasons. First, Craig Folbigg himself blurted the hidden sentence from the diary to the jury in the trial’s first week, the same period when one juror turned to Google. And, second, they were highlighted in pretrial articles about the case, ones that also reveal the history that juror found via Google. This makes it possible that Folbigg’s jurors in 2003 may have mimicked the very moment in 1999 when Craig Folbigg says that he started to think his wife was a murderer.

Fortunately, there’s no need to dwell on whether Folbigg’s seventh, eighth and ninth judges were wrong, any more than whether the other ten were wrong. Nor is there any need to engage in some undoubtedly uncomfortable speculation about why. Instead, as of this week, we can let all of that slide.

Just as evidence, and our takes on it or particular cases shift with time, so do courts’ takes on what is, and isn’t, a fair trial.

Juror research was once a matter of jokes, shrugs and warnings, but now it’s a crime in most parts of Australia. And, just this week, Australia’s High Court ruled that the past approach of the NSW courts to juror misconduct, including the test applied to dismiss Folbigg’s appeal, was wrong. Rather, when jurors knowingly disobey a judge’s direction, other than a trivial one, it will always be a miscarriage of justice.

The case before the High Court, like Folbigg’s, involved the discovery, after a trial, that one juror had searched the internet early in the case and had told the others what he found. The majority’s new test in such cases is to ask whether a layperson might reasonably apprehend that any juror might, as a consequence, not have decided the accused’s guilt on the evidence, according to law. If so, the majority declared, the trial would be “incurably flawed.”

The majority went on to rule that the new test wasn’t met in the case before it, but only because the juror had searched for information about how crimes are sentenced rather than about the accused or the case or the rules of proof. That was still wrong, they said, but it simply wasn’t clear either way whether the juror (and the other jurors, who didn’t report him during the trial) realised it was wrong.

Last year, I said much the same about the juror who brought an academic article about false rape accusations into a jury room, perhaps in the belief that such general research was allowed. Cases like these sharply contrast with what Folbigg’s juror did, specifically googling her name, reading websites about her case, and telling other jurors what was there. There is no way that could pass muster after this week.

Again, you don’t have to take my word for it. The other two judges in the High Court case, James Edelman and Simon Steward, who would have sent the case before them to a lower court for a rethink, decided to illustrate why the previous New South Wales approach was so dangerous. The example they chose was Folbigg’s appeal, during which, they said, the appeal panel “applied the wrong test,” “placed itself in the position of the jury” and “effectively reversed the usual onus.”

This step — effectively becoming the fifteenth and sixteenth judges to weigh in on Folbigg’s convictions — is extraordinary. It is also, surely, no coincidence that it comes after Bathurst’s report, which should be prompting many Australian judges to wonder what went wrong in that particular prosecution.

This week, three more NSW judges — the seventeenth through nineteenth, by my count — will be asked to weigh in on Folbigg’s conviction. Although Folbigg is out of jail (and cannot go back), she remains a convicted child murderer, unless and until a court holds otherwise.

Bathurst referred Folbigg’s case back to his former court so they could explore the same issue he’d decided: whether or not there is reasonable doubt about her conviction. But there is no need for the new court to, yet again, weigh up all of the evidence for or against.

The new judges can, and should, simply quash her jury’s verdicts because her trial was unfair, as their predecessors should have done sixteen years ago. •

The post Judging Kathleen Folbigg appeared first on Inside Story.

I’ve always found this class fascinating for the intergenerational transfer of ideas it affords, and as a means of tracking changes in students’ approaches to sex and gender. When I began teaching it more than ten years ago, everybody thought that MacKinnon “denied women agency” and nobody identified as a radical feminist, or a feminist at all for that matter, except for the clever girl in Birkenstocks, cargo pants and a women’s collective T-shirt down the front.

By around 2017, after Beyoncé declared herself a feminist and #MeToo swept across the globe, all my students became feminists. Men wrote essays on sexual assault that began with an asterisk next to their name linking to an admission that, yes, they were cis, white, straight, bourgeois men but they had attempted to amplify the voices of the marginalised to compensate for their privileges. MacKinnon was still on the out because this cohort thought women could be empowered by sex work, pornography or kink, and because nobody liked being a victim.

But this year, like last year, I have noticed a distinct change. My students appear to have returned to 1970s radical feminism. It’s not the postmodernist celebration of agency that speaks to this generation but the anger and the structural critiques of patriarchy found in Catharine MacKinnon, Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin.

Chanel Contos is part of this apparent radical feminist revival, and she has written a book that is erudite, powerful and urgent. I confess I was surprised to enjoy Consent Laid Bare as much as I did: the type is overly large (a friend called it idiot font), it’s aimed at teenagers, and twenty-five-year-old Chanel looks more like a student than a feminist critic.

I was expecting the kind of book we’ve become accustomed to from mainstream feminism: homespun wisdom gleaned from a few popular Netflix series, a few zingers and a rousing call to arms. Instead, Contos’s book is well researched and superbly argued, drawing on radical and postcolonial feminism to widen our understanding of what constitutes sexual violence and to contribute new solutions to a global problem with epidemic proportions.

Contos also extends radical feminism in clever ways. Where MacKinnon and Dworkin in the 1980s called on the state to prohibit pornography (and soon found queer erotica banned) and where #MeToo activists often have a carceral logic to their campaigns (the ideal end point is a lawsuit, then prison), Contos’s solutions are pedagogical and therapeutic. Thinking only in terms of law, she argues, ignores the fact that many survivors don’t want their attackers to go to prison; many simply want validation and an apology.

Where radical feminists critiqued the contractual origins of consent, Contos expands its meaning into the realm of emotion. The etymology of consent, she reminds us, is con, a bringing together, and sentio, to perceive with the senses. Sexual violence occurs when a man’s sense of entitlement overrides his empathy. To this extent, legal consent is a bare minimum. What we need is sex as a form of empathic communication: don’t treat someone how you want to be treated, treat someone how they want to be treated.

Contos’s journey as a consent activist began with her shock as a high school student when a sex-ed speaker came to her school and described a series of commonplace sexual scenarios but labelled them as sexual assault. It wasn’t just that Contos and most of her female friends could identify with these scenarios; their male friends were often the ones responsible.

In 2021, troubled by the pervasiveness of the problem, Contos decided to obtain solid empirical data by asking people online to share their stories of sexual assault during their school years. Seven thousand people sent in testimonies describing behaviour that would fit legal definitions of rape, also mentioning the good jobs their attackers held in order to show both a lack of accountability and the fact that “normal and functioning” people were typical rapists, not strangers in the park.

Contos then built a website called Teach Us Consent that included a web petition signed by nearly 50,000 Australians demanding mandatory consent education in schools. A year later, state education ministers met and agreed to her demands.

These nationwide changes to our education system have happened around the same time as shifts in consent’s legal definition towards active and ongoing consent. The question is no longer whether the person said no, but whether they said yes. Intoxication now completely vitiates consent.

Consent Laid Bare is divided into ten chapters, each of which is aimed at expanding our narratives of sexual assault, whether they concern what a rapist looks like; what causes rape (specifically how rape culture normalises sexual violence); how women respond to rape; how digital technologies and pornography have created new forms of violence; and how we need to go beyond legal solutions when trying to hold men accountable, and to end sexual violence.

Contos’s arguments about the causes of sexual violence will be familiar to anyone versed in radical feminist literature. Because rape is construed as an expression of masculine power and domination — an act that keeps all women in a state of fear and hypervigilance — education about consent is necessary but not sufficient. The problem is wider and deeper.

Girls are raised to accommodate the desires of others, to evacuate the self, to feel shame around their own sexuality and to feel like they don’t have a right to demand pleasure. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to not take no for an answer, particularly if they’re the entitled private school boys that Contos grew up with. They’ve absorbed the view that their sexuality is biologically irrepressible, hydraulic and ungovernable, and that they can offend without consequence. Where girls receive social rewards for their passivity and self-abnegation, boys are rewarded for acts of physical intimidation or ability, wealth and sexual conquests.

This socialisation is part of what Contos, and the radical feminists before her, term “rape culture.” This is a world where sexual assault is normalised by gendered expectations of men and women, where girls are told that wearing a short skirt is distracting for the boys in the class (who simply won’t be able to contain their sexual urges) or where a victim of sexual assault is immediately disbelieved and socially shamed, while the boy walks off scot-free. This wider context helps us to understand not simply why some men feel entitled to rape, but also why women often put up with sex that is uncomfortable, unwelcome or coercive.

Any person over the age of twenty will likely read sections of Contos’s book in a state of fascinated horror: the chapters on sex and the online world and pornography make for particularly grim reading. I was quite unaware that strangulation had become a normal part of sex, which boys assumed girls enjoyed so much that consent was unnecessary. Given that 84 per cent of men aged between fifteen and twenty-nine watch porn at least once a week, there’s no prizes for guessing where these new sexual scripts might be coming from. I was also shocked to find that a girl might now be sitting on a bus or train and a man could send an unsolicited dick pic by airdrop on to her phone.

In Contos’s experience, girls begin being asked to send nudes to boys around the age of twelve (yes, twelve!) while a 2022 Australian study found that 86 per cent of students aged fourteen to eighteen had received sexual messages or images, and 71 per cent had sent them. By the time Contos, as a consent educator, speaks to high school students aged fourteen and older, she says that many say that they’re “over” the sexting stage. In a digital extension of the centuries-old tradition of slut-shaming, a girl whose nudes get “leaked” faces embarrassment and shame, while the boy doing the leaking usually rises up the social hierarchy, congratulated by his male friends on a new conquest.

In this context, it is entirely understandable that generation Z might be rejecting what Contos calls “modern feminism” and returning to the clear, unambiguous critiques of sexual violence offered by radical feminists. Why are all the things  popular feminists celebrate women “choosing” to do — from watching porn, to shaving legs, to wearing high heels, to engaging in sex work — exactly what patriarchy and capitalism want them to do?

“Modern feminism has framed sex work as sexually liberating and put pornography and sex work in the category of strictly Do Not Debate,” Contos argues. Far from being a “righteous reversal of the gender hierarchy,” sex work is not only the most dangerous job in the world, but it also goes hand in hand with capitalism. Unlike radical feminists before her, however, Contos doesn’t argue for state regulation, simply for a more open debate and for an end to the popular, uncritical equation of sex with empowerment.

I suspect that the predominance of psychological discourse among gen-Zers — their tendency to describe their identities through languages of trauma, fragility or pathology — also makes them less concerned about the elements of radical feminism that see women as victims. This is a generation who accept their vulnerability and woundedness, and for whom the most important question is not how they have agency but how to end sexual violence and gender oppression.

In short, this is a book that you should thrust into the hands of the teenage boys and girls in your life. But you should also read it yourself first, both as a fascinating document that signals what might be a historic shift in discourse away from poststructuralism towards radical feminism, and also because Chanel Contos, with her well-researched, well-reasoned and well-written arguments, is smart and inspirational. •

Consent Laid Bare: Sex, Entitlement & the Distortion of Desire
By Chanel Contos | Macmillan Australia | $36.99 | 368 pages

The post Active and ongoing appeared first on Inside Story.

The way we talk about Google has also changed, reflecting a wider reassessment of the costs and benefits of our connected lives. In its earlier days, Google Search was enthusiastically embraced as an ingenious tool that democratised knowledge and saved human labour. Today, Google’s many services are more popular than ever, though Google Search is the subject of a major antitrust case in the United States, and governments around the world want to regulate digital services and AI.

In Power and Progress, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson take the project of critical reappraisal further. Their survey of the thousand-year entanglement of technology and power is a tour de force, sketching technology’s political economy across a broad historical canvas. They chart the causes and symptoms of our contemporary digital malaise, drawing on a growing volume of journalism and scholarship, political economy’s long tradition of analysing “the machine question,” and the work of extraordinary earlier American technologists, notably the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, the network visionary J.C.R. Licklider, and the engineer Douglas Engelbart.

If, as Acemoglu and Johnson argue, our digital economy is characterised by mass surveillance, increasing inequality and destructive floods of misinformation, then the signal moments from the past will inevitably look different. From this angle, the great significance of Google Search was its integration with online advertising, opening up the path to Facebook and a panoply of greater evils.

The strengths of Power and Progress lie in the connections it makes between the deficiencies of current technology and the longer story of innovation and economic inequality. History offers many opportunities to debunk our nineteenth-century optimism in technology as a solution, and to puncture our overconfidence in the judgement of technology leaders.

A particular target is the idea that successful innovations produce economy-wide benefits by making workers more productive, leading to increased wages and higher living standards generally. The theory fails to capture a good deal of historical experience. The impact of new agricultural technologies during the Middle Ages provides a telling example. Between 1000 and 1300, a series of innovations in water mills, windmills, ploughs and fertiliser roughly doubled yields in England per hectare. But rather than leading to higher incomes for most people, living standards appear to have declined, with increases in taxation and working hours, widespread malnutrition, a series of famines and then the Black Death. Average life expectancy may have declined to just twenty-five years at birth.

The cities grew, but most of the surplus generated by improved agriculture was captured by the church and its extensive hierarchy. A religious building boom proceeded on spectacular lines. Vast amounts were spent on hugely expensive cathedrals and tax-exempt monasteries: the same places, as Acemoglu and Johnson note, that tourists now cherish for their devotion to learning and production of fine beer. The fact that better technology didn’t lead to higher wages reflects the institutional context: a coercive labour market combined with control of the mills enabled landowners to increase working hours, leaving labourers with less time to raise their own crops, and therefore reduced incomes.

If medieval cathedrals give rise to scepticism about the benefits of tech, it follows that we should think more carefully about the kinds of technologies we want. Without that attention, what the authors call “so-so automation” proliferates, reducing employment while creating no great benefit to consumers. The self-checkout systems in our supermarkets today are a case in point: these machines simply shift the work of scanning items from cashiers to customers. Fewer cashiers are employed, but without any productivity gain. The machines frequently fail, requiring frequent human intervention. Food doesn’t get any cheaper.

The issue then is not how or whether any given technology generates economic growth, but which conditions make possible innovations that create shared prosperity. The recent past provides examples of societies managing large-scale technological change reasonably well. The postwar period of sustained high growth and “good jobs” (for some but not all) had three important features: the powers of employers were sometimes matched by unions; the new industrial technologies of mass production automated tasks in ways that also created jobs; and progressive taxation enabled governments to build social security, education and health systems that improved overall living standards.

For technology to work for everyone, the forces that can temper the powers of corporations — effective regulators, labour and consumer organisations, a robust and independent media — play an essential role. The media are especially important in shaping narratives of innovation and technical possibility. Our most visible technology heroes need not always be move-fast-and-break-things entrepreneurs.

Finally, public policy can help redirect innovation efforts away from a focus on automation, data collection and job displacement towards applications that productively expand human skills. Technologies are often malleable: they can frequently be used for many purposes.

Acemoglu and Johnson would like us to divert all that frothy attention on AI to what they call machine usefulness, focused on improving human productivity, giving people better information on which to base decisions, supporting new kinds of work, and enabling the creation of new platforms for cooperation and coordination: a course they see as far preferable to a universal basic income.

Kenya’s famous M-PESA, introduced in 2007, is one of many examples, offering cheap and convenient banking using basic mobile phones. On a larger scale, the web is also a human-oriented technology because its application of hypertext is ultimately a tool for expanding access to information and knowledge. Acemoglu and Johnson concede that the idea at the heart of Google Search can also be understood in this way: a mechanism that works well for humans because it is constantly reconfiguring itself in response to human queries.

The authors’ ideas for positive policy interventions can usefully be read alongside those of the Australian economists Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, whose 2019 book Innovation + Equality remains less used than it should be.

One way to read Power and Progress is as a historically informed guidebook for the conflicts of our time — in the courts, where Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission has launched far-reaching cases against Google and Amazon, in the new regulatory systems emerging in the European Union, Canada and elsewhere, and in the wave of industrial actions taken by screen industry writers and auto workers in the United States.

In Australia, we are also at a point where governments will soon make decisions about the kinds of technology we want to support or constrain. We can have no certainty about the outcomes of any of this, but Acemoglu and Johnson argue that such conflicts are both necessary and potentially productive. They diverge here from one of the main currents of liberal technology critique: where writers like Carl Benedikt Frey, whose The Technology Trap (2019) covers some of the same terrain, see redistributive policies as necessary for managing the consequences of automation, Acemoglu and Johnson point to the positive potential of political and industrial conflict for reordering technological agendas. They want to place more emphasis on our capacity to choose the directions technology may take.

The recently concluded Hollywood writers’ strike offers an intriguing example. The key point is that the screen writers didn’t oppose the use of generative AIs such as ChatGTP in screenwriting. Instead they secured an agreement that such AIs can’t be recognised as writers and that a studio may not require the use of an AI. If a studio uses an AI to generate a draft script that it then provides to a writer, the credit or payment to the writer will be the same as if the writer had produced the draft entirely themselves; and a writer may use an AI with the permission of the studio without reducing their credit or payment.

The settlement clearly foreshadows the extensive use of generative AIs in the screen industries while offering a share of the benefits to writers. The critical point, as some reports have noted, may be that the revenue-sharing deal with writers preserves the intellectual property interests of the studios, since works created by an AI may not be copyrightable.

Meanwhile, AI raises other important issues about automation, quite apart from the focus on work. When we are relying on machines to make or inform decisions, we are also moving into the domain of institutions, with the obvious risk that existing technology-specific laws, procedures and controls can be bypassed, intentionally or otherwise. This, after all, was what robodebt did with a very simple automated system. In the absence of wide-ranging institutional adaptation and innovation, more complex modes of automation will pose greater risks.

More generally, the authors’ framing of the “AI illusion” appears to be premature. Power and Progress was clearly substantially completed before the appearance of the most recent versions of ChatGPT. Accustomed as we are to AI’s many failures to match its promises, we should now be considering the surprising capabilities and broad implications of large language models. As Acemoglu and Johnson would insist, if generative AI does turn out to be as powerful as many believe, then it will necessarily be capable of far more than “so-so” automation. •

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
By Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson | Basic Books | $34.99 | 546 pages

The post Machine questions appeared first on Inside Story.

The problem turned out to be technical. The computer system used by the agents, designed on the assumption that unaccompanied minors were travelling solo, had no way of recording a link between them and their parents. Some agents stuck sticky notes on infants’ onesies. Others kept makeshift records that were lost when the children were moved.

In Recoding America, technology writer Jennifer Pahlka tells the stories of how technological successes and failures have affected the way the US government operates. As founder of the non-profit Code for America and deputy chief technology officer under president Barack Obama, Pahlka is ideally placed to show why government computer systems sometimes underperform (and occasionally outperform) our expectations.

In one case, a pair of young coders set about redesigning the website for people to apply for food stamps in California. The existing website contained 212 questions and could take up to an hour to complete. Because it didn’t work on mobile devices, some homeless people would try applying at a public library computer only to find it kicked them off after half an hour. The coding duo redesigned the system to remove irrelevant questions, made it mobile-friendly, and ensured that the application process could be completed in about seven minutes.

Part of the reason government websites are so complicated, Pahlka argues, is that their creators rarely stop to think about the consequences of complexity. She quotes a colleague of hers admonishing website designers: “Every time you add a question to a form, I want you to imagine the user filling it out with one hand while using the other to break up a brawl between toddlers.”

The philosophy of good government services, Pahlka argues, rests on dignity. Services that respect our time, use straightforward terms and don’t make us feel stupid will not only work better; they will also help build a greater sense of trust in government.

Pahlka discusses the debacle of President Obama’s healthcare.gov site, whose glitches prevented hundreds of thousands of Americans from obtaining health insurance in the first few weeks after its launch. By contrast, she notes that the covidtests.gov site worked beautifully, allowing Americans to order four free Covid tests in less than a minute.

Part of the difference was that mailing out tests is easier than selling insurance, but the designers of covidtests.gov also made a deliberate decision to keep their site straightforward. In distributing free Covid tests, the designers might reasonably have asked users their vaccine status and household size. They might have required everyone to check a box promising not to resell the tests. But they recognised that the longer it took to use, the fewer people would order tests. They opted for the KISS principle: keep it simple, stupid.

Fixing one problem often leads to another. Pahlka tells the story of the US veterans affairs department, whose website worked only with the software versions used by those inside the agency and often crashed when used with the browsers and document readers on veterans’ home computers. When the department fixed the online form, the number of incoming applications jumped tenfold. Suddenly the problem wasn’t a faulty website, it was a backlog of applications. Some departmental officials wanted the agency to revert to its technically flawed application form. To the department’s credit, its leadership chose to clear the backlog instead.

Government is the focus of Recoding America, but the problems are familiar in many large organisations. Pahlka wryly notes Kodak’s decision to outsource most of its information technology staff to IBM in 1989. In the 1970s, the company had produced the first digital camera prototype; in 2012, sideswiped by the rise of electronic photography, the company filed for bankruptcy. We’ll never know whether the pre-eminent photography company of the twentieth century could have transitioned into the digital age if it had kept its technological expertise in-house. But the decision didn’t help.

In 2001, Robert D. Atkinson and I wrote a report titled Breaking Down Bureaucratic Barriers: The Next Phase of Digital Government for the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. Reading back through that report two decades on, some of it seems quaint. At the time, the US government had only been online for eight years. One of our recommendations was that government websites should allow personalisation through the use of cookies — a radical notion at the time.

But some of our suggestions still ring true. Government websites should be arranged with a focus on consumers, not producers. Just as Amazon’s homepage doesn’t feature a photo of Jeff Bezos, service-oriented government websites should be designed around customers’ needs. Atkinson and I argued that governments should avoid the silo mentality revealed by websites that show only the programs provided by a single agency, and instead structure the information around users.

Layers of government within Australia can also be time-consuming and confusing obstacles for citizens. But with sensible use of technology, government can make it easy for people to understand and access all the services available to them.

The Australian government has commenced organising services by life event. A trial allows new parents to perform one simple transaction in myGov to enrol the newborn in Medicare, initiate family assistance claims, and register the birth with the state or territory government. In principle, government can do the same with retirement. If a citizen commences on the age pension, why not offer to add state or territory government concession cards to the myGov wallet and connect the new pensioner with financial support services?

According to Pahlka, American adults spend an average of forty-two hours per year on paperwork for the federal government — a figure that doesn’t include the forms they fill out for state and local governments. Making government easier to use could pay massive dividends for the community. One way to think about it is that if the typical working day is eight hours long, then reducing the paperwork burden by one-fifth would be like giving each American adult another public holiday.

Pahlka quotes Cecilia Muñoz, head of the Domestic Policy Council under President Obama: “We need to think bigger than bringing tech solutions to policy problems.” It’s not the tech, she argues, it’s the tech people. The successful covidtests.gov site wasn’t built by a private provider, it was designed in-house by a team from the US Digital Service and the US Postal Service. The whole project took six weeks.

Technology will change, but the principles of good technology design will remain constant. Design systems based on consumer needs, not government imperatives. Keep private information secure. Beware of locking in legacy architecture. Encourage innovation by breaking projects into small, achievable components. Don’t make websites any more complicated than necessary.

If I were to take a single message from Recoding America, it would be about the relationship between tech firms and government. Governments should learn from how the best technology companies design their websites and apps, tweaking their interfaces to maximise the user experience. Yet just because there’s a lot to learn from the private sector, it doesn’t follow that outsourcing is always desirable. Having coding expertise within government helps align policy and delivery, allows troubleshooting and improvements, and places a priority on that most straightforward of goals: delivering public services effectively. •

Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better
By Jennifer Pahlka | Metropolitan Books | $49.99 | 346 pages

The post Recoding government appeared first on Inside Story.

When the first mobile calls were made in the 1970s, there were staggering differences in the level of access to (landline) telephone services and how they were delivered. The United States had thirty-three telephones per hundred people at the beginning of that decade. In Africa, the figure was “trivially low,” and still just 1.5 nearly twenty-five years later.

Some telecommunications equipment like network switches and handsets was traded internationally, but a good deal was produced domestically, with global patents embedded in distinctive local designs. Although a United Nations agency coordinated international regulation of the business, services in most countries were offered to customers through unique, national enterprises, controlled and financed by governments. Customers could place calls across borders but most of the traffic was local and interstate.

The model for the future was open borders and less state involvement. More equipment would be traded across national boundaries, sourced from fewer, larger factories where global manufacturers would centralise production. Globally endorsed principles would smooth away the idiosyncrasies of national regulation and policy. Privatised state-owned enterprises, stripped of their monopolies, would allow telecoms corporations to expand into other national markets. These incumbents and new entrants would be able to target global customer bases. As people and businesses crossed borders more easily and frequently, the telephone would host more global conversations.

In sum, technologies, policies, institutions and practices would coalesce. The devices and the rules, the companies and the customers, would all look and act more like each other.

The mobile phone helped to make much of this happen. It did it in numbered waves — 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G, now 5G, and soon enough 6G — each one a generational transformation in technology that provided a decisive opportunity to disrupt policies, organisations and practices. Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz and Martin Campbell-Kelly chart the first four of these generations in Cellular: An Economic and Business History of the International Mobile-Phone Industry.

The early mobile licences in the 1980s gave governments a felicitous opportunity to introduce competition for their mainly state-owned incumbents. The second (digital) generation, in the 1990s, helped to reduce the cost of what had been a premium service, making mobile a consumer proposition even in developing countries, where billions of people were finally able to make phone calls for the first time. “2G” also added text messages to the functionality of mobile “phones.”

Hotter demand for radiofrequency spectrum encouraged governments to change the way they allocated and charged for it. Mobile operators bid fabulous sums in the early 2000s to acquire the spectrum they wanted for the next generation of technology that promised the-internet-on-your-mobile. 3G did not quite deliver this but the “smartphones” created to capitalise on it accelerated demand for a technology that would. That was 4G, adopted commercially in Scandinavian countries in 2009 and by Vodafone and others in Australia a few years later.

If there was a time when the idealised model of mobile telephony came close to matching the reality revealed in the mirror, this moment in the early 2010s might have been it. The distribution of mobile services around the world now looked more like the distribution of people. China and India dominated both. In 1990, the United States had led the world with five million mobile services. By 2010, China had 859 million and India 752 million. US numbers had grown too but were now well behind, with 285 million. Most of the other places in the top ten were taken by countries like Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, Vietnam and Pakistan, rather than the Europeans and North Americans that led in 1990.

Mobile operators around the world were adopting a single technical standard for 4G (essentially), Long Term Evolution, or LTE, not multiple ones as they had done with previous generations. Mobile market structures looked similar in many places that had introduced services at quite different times. Competition existed almost everywhere, though there was not as much as regulators would have liked. Oligopoly had become the global fashion: early adopters like the United States and Britain, where multiple competitors had started up, were experiencing consolidation; late adopters that began with single operators now had sustainable rivalry.

Multinational corporations with mobile operations spanning many territories (like Singtel, owner of Optus, and Vodafone) were now the norm; those mainly focused on a single national market (like Telstra) were the exception. Mobile telephones had become everything devices for everyone, everywhere. No longer just tools for conversation and texting, they were cameras, diaries, contact books, money machines, street directories and maps, tour guides, health monitors, entertainment screens and much else.

The moment was not perfect and in any case it didn’t last. As some forces were stimulating the convergence of technologies, policies, institutions and practices, others were pulling them apart. Perhaps most striking has been the fall and rise of the corporations delivering different elements of the equipment and services that make up the mobile business.

In the mid 1990s, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens and Alcatel, all based in Europe, and Motorola, headquartered in the United States, together supplied between 80 and 90 per cent of the world markets for 2G (GSM) base stations, switching systems and handsets.

Ericsson is still Ericsson, a telecoms equipment giant, supplying 5G and other equipment to Telstra and many operators around the world. It is already “well underway” with research on 6G, which it hopes will deliver “truly omnipresent wireless intelligence” early in the 2030s. But Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent progressively merged into what is now Nokia Networks. And Motorola split into two: “Motorola Solutions,” still based in Chicago, concentrating on “public safety and enterprise security”; the mobile device business sold to Google and then — minus many of its patents — to Lenovo.

Lenovo is one of several Chinese companies, all of them established in what Garcia-Swartz and Campbell-Kelly call the “first wave” of Chinese entrepreneurship in the 1980s, that became global communications equipment behemoths. Two others, Huawei and ZTE, both founded in Shenzen, used their success in the local market as a platform for international expansion. By the mid 2010s, they were “diversified telecommunications conglomerates that had transformed the world telecommunications-equipment market.” In 2018, Huawei was the global cellular infrastructure market leader, with 31 per cent market share, ahead of Ericsson (27 per cent), Nokia (22 per cent) and ZTE (11 per cent). They are now “among the world leaders in 5G-related intellectual property.”

The market for mobile handsets has also been upended. Each generation of mobile technology spawned winners and losers. Success, even dominance, in one era didn’t guarantee so much as survival in the next. The most disruptive changes came with smartphones, first deployed over 3G and then on 4G networks. These brought new names to the mobile industry and big changes to the inner workings of phones. Smartphone operating systems and the more sophisticated “baseband” processors needed to drive increasingly complex phones became discrete fields of competition. Some of the biggest winners were companies outside the traditional telecommunications industry which levered their assets, skills and capital into these new fields.

When Apple released its first iPhone in 2007, mobile phones using the Symbian operating system (co-owned by Psion, Nokia, Ericsson and Motorola) had nearly two-thirds of the market. Six years later, Symbian had virtually disappeared. The iPhone had changed the world but it had not overrun it. Around 15 per cent of global handsets sold in 2013 ran Apple’s iOS operating system; nearly 80 per cent were running Google’s Android, released the year after the iPhone.

Manufacturers paid no licence fee to incorporate Google’s open source operating system into their handsets. One of them, Korea’s Samsung, increased its share of global handset sales from about 3 per cent in 2009 to around 30 per cent three years later, according to Statista, as sales by the early smartphone leaders, Nokia and Blackberry, collapsed. A decade on, Samsung sold around 22 per cent of the smartphones shipped across the world in the first quarter of 2023, and Apple 20 per cent, while three relatively young Chinese brands, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, accounted for a total of around 29 per cent.

The story doesn’t end in China, nor even in Asia. The “new frontier for cellular carriers and equipment manufacturers,” say Garcia-Swartz and Campbell-Kelly, is Africa. Here, the mobile phone network operators provide a remarkable illustration of that continuing confluence of technology, power, business and culture.

A “first wave” of private mobile operations came from three “emerging-market multinationals” created and headquartered in Africa — Telcel (Zaire), the enterprise that eventually became Celtel (Uganda) and MTN (South Africa). A few European operators had a “modest presence” in the 1990s, including Vodafone in partnership with incumbents in South Africa (Vodacom); the British Cable and Wireless in MTN; France Telecom in former French colonies like Ivory Coast and Senegal. Then mobile operators from the Arabian Peninsula, including UAE-based Etisalat, expanded into Africa in the 2000s by buying stakes in existing operators and launching services in other territories. In the 2010s, Indian operator Bharti Airtel acquired the operator that had taken over and expanded Celtel.

By 2015, the Big 5 mobile constellations in Africa were MTN, Bharti Airtel, Vodacom, Orange (France Telecom’s rebrand) and Etisalat, an eclectic mix of homegrown enterprise, colonial continuity and neighbourhood expansion.

The rise of China and its corporations also, eventually, provoked a political and strategic backlash that is unpicking physical and commercial networks, especially in telecommunications. Australia effectively banned Chinese telecoms equipment makers Huawei and ZTE from supplying equipment for the National Broadband Network in 2012 and local 5G networks in 2018.

New, celebratory buzzwords like “reshoring” and “friend-shoring” have been coined for the partial dismantling of the globally dispersed manufacturing supply chains once trumpeted as the apogee of a global age. The annual reports of the “communications access coordinator” established under Australia’s 2018 Telecommunications Sector Security Reforms identify “complex multi-vendor/subcontractor, multi-jurisdiction supply chains” not as economic marvels but as misunderstood security risks.

Mobile data traffic and 5G subscriptions are swelling around the world, but Ericsson forecasts overall mobile subscriptions to grow only modestly over the next few years. Global smartphone shipments in the first quarter of 2023 were 13 per cent below the figure in 2022 and “red cap” (reduced capacity) devices have been announced. Mobile operators are struggling to generate adequate returns on the needed investment: a recent report from Venture Insights (commissioned by Optus) warned of a “digital investment gap” between the capital required to upgrade networks to support surging usage and the revenues earned from customers hooked on falling prices or increasing value from their mobile plans.

In the late 1990s, a black-clad IT consultant told me what was needed to bring my small legal centre’s computer network up to the cusp of the twenty-first century. He was right about almost everything: desktop iMacs and email for all staff; ethernet to connect us. It seems embarrassingly obvious in retrospect.

It was so obvious to the consultant that he took almost no notes. The few he needed were composed with an electric pen, magically applied to the screen of a small device he held in his other hand, an Apple Newton. Crestfallen, I realised we couldn’t afford The Future after all.

Apple’s Newton was eventually buried in the deepest grave the 1990s offered for devices and practices that missed their moment: parodied in an episode of The Simpsons. Steve Jobs killed it off when he returned to Apple for his “second act.” The idea of interacting with a handheld screen without using a keyboard was great; this iteration was expensive and unreliable. Newton came to be seen as an interesting but ultimately comical wrong turn on the road to the touchscreen smartphones that took over the mobile communications world in the 2010s.

The regular, generational rhythms of mobile personal communications from 1G to 6G paint a misleading predictability across the surface of this capricious industry. Messages are exchanged seamlessly within and across borders and cultures, while power and profit draw technologies and institutions into fickle, fragile forms. •

Cellular: An Economic and Business History of the International Mobile-Phone Industry
By Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz and Martin Campbell-Kelly | MIT Press | US$45 | 387 pages

The post Mobile generations appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps the sheer number of Žižek’s books — averaging about two each year since the early 2000s — makes it hard to find a definitive entry-point. Perhaps it is his free-flowing style, alternating between anecdotes and esoteric, jargon-laden philosophical argumentation. Or perhaps it’s a well-deserved dose of his own medicine: he confesses to not having seen half of the movies he criticises, with the latest offence being committed against Matrix Resurrections in 2022.

For some, his wide-ranging commentaries and humorous style signify a public intellectual par excellence; for others, they reveal a clownish charlatan. A podcast dedicated to discussing his ideas is called Žižek and So On, capturing his most famous signature phrase (“pure ideology” comes a close second). His personal idiosyncrasies include incessant nose-rubbing and sniffling and a studied refusal to wear a button-up shirt in public appearances.

Two YouTube videos, in juxtaposition, testify to Žižek’s internet-era pop-star status. The first is a nine-hour collage of a lecture series he delivered on Friedrich Hegel; the other, a seven-second clip, shows the philosopher obliviously enjoying hotdogs on the street, probably in his hometown of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he still resides. Both have attracted hundreds of thousands of views and many adoring comments.

Although Žižek made his name interpreting Marx, Hegel and Jacques Lacan — and interpreting the world through them — he seems to have consciously renounced the position of authoritative intellectual. His eccentricities are the performative embodiment of this stance — as the philosopher himself insists, the truth of one’s belief is in one’s actions, not some elusive, self-deceiving inner life. Perhaps his nervous tics are a physiological manifestation of the imposter syndrome which he fully embraces.

Bar-El’s new book, How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual, likewise embodies some of the qualities it ascribes to Žižek. As his title suggests, Bar-El is not concerned primarily with Žižek’s theories or politics, but the sociological and historical process by which he became a global phenomenon. The substance is in the form.

Zižek’s emergence from the political and intellectual crossroads that was Slovenia, where he was born in 1949, had a certain inevitability. As the west-most component of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Slovenia enjoyed a connection with the “free world” unmatched by other socialist states thanks to the relatively liberal rule of Josip Tito and his successors. A vibrant intellectual scene was facilitated by its soft border with Italy and thus the rest of Western Europe.

In the absence of a unified and rigid official Marxist doctrine, Yugoslavia’s door was open to various theoretical formations. The Frankfurt School, Existentialism and Structuralism all found audiences and interlocutors there. Žižek was reading “Marx at age fifteen, Heidegger at twenty, Derrida at twenty-five, and Lacan and Hegel at thirty,” writes Bar-El, and embarked on his second PhD in Paris in 1979, having worked briefly in the communist bureaucracy.

Žižek and his theoretical fellow-travellers formed the Ljubljana School in the early 1980s. Rather than submitting to Eastern Marxism or Western Structuralism, they appropriated the core insights of Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and also drew on a mix of other traditions. It was an early example of Žižek’s “superpositioning,” a term from quantum mechanics that Bar-El uses to describe the creation of a third position from an existing opposition as a way of breaking out of theoretical and political deadlocks.

Žižek’s move to France had a crude materialist rationale too: he wanted to escape his uncertain prospects in an institution in which the Yugoslav party-state pickled its dissident intellectuals. Unemployed on returning from France, Žižek is no stranger to marginalisation.

Dissidents enjoyed much greater freedom in Yugoslavia than in any other self-proclaimed socialist countries. In fact, not only did the authorities tolerate cynicism about the country’s doctrine of “self-managed socialism” but also they regarded such cynicism as a prerequisite for continued compliance to the system. One of Žižek’s favourite anecdotes was how, in the mid 1970s, two of his acquaintances lost their party jobs for being true believers of official ideology.

The best way to challenge a purportedly tolerant, self-critical regime was therefore through self-conscious “overidentification,” which dissident art collectives, especially the punk movement, increasingly did in their public performances throughout the 1980s. While attacking an ideological edifice from without could unwittingly reproduce shared presuppositions, overidentification threatened to lay bare their hidden reversal in the regime’s operation.

Like Žižek’s other lessons from “real socialism,” this insight would be applied to his intellectual intervention in the liberal-democratic West. The torture carried out in Abu Ghraib prison, for instance, was not scandalous because it deviated from “American values” but because it was the “obscene supplement… the barbarism that sustains our civilisation” in the middle of a “pre-emptive war” that sacrificed the lives and livelihoods of Iraqis for the perceived security of America and its allies.

Žižek’s theories are always immanently political while seemingly easily discoverable in popular culture. Having himself undergone military service, he finds overidentification in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, in which the protagonist remains a proficient soldier because of his cynical distance, while “Private Pyle” is subsumed by the “voice of the superego [of military discipline]” and becomes (self-)destructive. Bar-El doesn’t include this example, but he does identify superpositioning between fact and fiction as another characteristic Žižekian move.

As “actually existing socialism” crumbled and the future of Slovenia became uncertain, pluralist left-wing movements vied for influence against neoliberal nationalists. The vision of a capitalist regime contained in an organic national community was the antithesis of the Ljubljana School’s theoretical lynchpin of the “split subject”: the inherently contradictory individual subjectivity within any politico-ideological system, which are themselves contradictory too.

Žižek narrowly lost the race to be one of four presidents of Slovenia in 1990, running as a candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party — a move intended, he explained, to claim the popular banner of liberalism before free-market proponents could. He seems to enjoy performing such politically charged linguistic manoeuvres. During the 2020 US election campaign he advised progressives to embrace the label “moral majority” on the basis of their commitment to equality and meeting human needs, in contrast to a political right that was increasingly resorting to “alternative facts,” brutality, and obscenity. It was the same reason he gave for his tame presentation — for some, frustratingly tame — in his famous 2019 debate with Jordan Peterson.

Bar-El details the contrast between Žižek’s lacklustre reception in France in the late 1980s and his subsequent phenomenal success in the Anglophone world. The making of a public intellectual is inexorably social. The French scene, with long-established and heavily fortified intellectual communities, left little room for a new entrant distinguished by his superpositioning between disciplines, between academic and politically engaged writing styles, and between French theories and German Idealism. Nor was Žižek helped by the controversial status of his PhD supervisor, Jacques-Alain Miller, or his own insistence on taking Lacanian psychoanalysis out of clinics and into the realm of philosophy (to the disapproval of Miller himself).

Helped by the “post-Marxist” political philosopher Ernesto Laclau, who also provided a preface, Žižek published his first English-language book, the theory-dense The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). As Laclau articulated it, Zizek was positioned — by himself and others — “to address the problems of constructing a democratic socialist political project in a post-Marxist age.” Thus began his long association with the leftist non-academic publisher Verso, which would open up an international readership for others in the Ljubljana School.

Professional and personal networks brought Žižek and his theories into dialogue with Judith Butler, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and other prominent intellectuals. The fall of communism in Europe also created a space for him to, as Bar-El succinctly puts it, “explain the East to the West, in Western theoretical terms and channels.” An early example, not mentioned in the book, was a 1996 documentary that opens with Žižek standing on a bridge in Ljubljana and informing his audience that the river beneath him is the geographical boundary between Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) and the Balkans. On one side is “horror, oriental despotism,” where women are subject to horrendous violence and “like it”; on the other is “Europe, civilisation,” where women suffer likewise “but don’t like it.” The obvious materialist point aside, this was the quintessential Žižek: forsaking scholarly respectability for black humour; delving into “low culture” to reveal inherent, deep contradictions; questioning seemingly natural oppositions to gesture at what he sees as a true alternative.

Žižek’s rise in the global scene coincided with the onset of the digital revolution during the 1990s, a decade in which his unparalleled output and “copy-and-paste” quality (“self-plagiarism” for his critics) fitted perfectly. His “Hegelacanese” — as Bar-El calls his synthesis of Hegel and Lacan — proved remarkably apt at encoding key ideas in easily transmittable packages, regardless of whether the consumer has the wherewithal to decode them properly. If anyone was producing memes it was Žižek.

After the 9/11 attacks and during the war on terror his prolific and timely commentary propelled him into prominence, and here Bar-El provides an excellent summary of his counterintuitive arguments and their reception. From then on, Žižek would not let an international cataclysm go untheorised — the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the ongoing ecological crisis and (presumably too late to be included by Bar-El) the Covid-19 pandemic, publishing a book on the latter as early as March 2020. His growing intellectual and cultural impact is attested to by his growing associations, including with Julian Assange, Yanis Varoufakis and Sophie Fiennes, who directed two documentary films that brought Žižek and psychoanalysis into the cinema.

The public interventions came at the expense of Žižek’s scholarly credibility, with academics increasingly viewing his (often suspiciously) swift public interventions as regurgitative and crowd-pleasing. Some, such as the political philosopher John Gray, fault Žižek for “reproduc[ing] the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism” and thus achieving a “deceptive substance.” His Hegelacanese has attracted controversy, and his ever-expanding interdisciplinary forays also led to further questions of his status as a philosopher. Indeed, Žižek positions himself as a member of the public that he addresses, with his subjective doubt resonating with that of his audience.

Bar-El is very precise here: “Žižek both assumes and rejects the position of an authoritative intellectual, enjoying its universal and general status while denying its elitism and exclusivity.” In this he follows Lacan in arguing that the “subject-supposed-to-know” — the benevolent, internally consistent authority, fully identified with the role conferred by the social order — does not exist. As Lacan famously put it, “The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.”

Like the French, the Anglophone world has trouble determining what Žižek’s role really is. His work is often introduced in the context of literature studies rather than philosophy, and most of his followers discovered him outside the universities. And yet, as evidenced by the commercial success of his thousand-page doorstopper, Less Than Nothing (2012), there is a hunger in the reading public for a philosopher who brings the intellectual ivory tower and the masses to each other’s level, seemingly without compromising either philosophical niceties or socio-political relevance.

Žižek’s insistence on demonstrating philosophical ideas through examples, even mundane or vulgar ones, is not merely a pragmatic choice. He treats pop-culture artifacts as a window into the ideological unconscious that operates beneath visible social phenomena. In accordance with his reading of Hegel, he doesn’t regard theory as existing separately from its concrete manifestations. Indeed, examples can subvert the ideas they are supposed to reflect.

He thus rejects a common leftist refrain that Marxism was never truly practised in the communist countries, as if there was some “pure” spirit of Marxism on an astral plane invariably perverted by historical contingences. The failure of “actually existing socialism” must instead be traced to the blueprints and their authors — though without negating the necessity to continue to “fail better,” as Žižek’s favourite Samuel Beckett refrain goes.

This is one of most important keys to understanding Žižek. It isn’t mentioned by Bar-El, whose focus on the process and phenomenon of Žižek’s rise and fall within the confines of 189 pages inevitably requires trade-offs. Certain historical details, especially pertaining to the Slovenian scene of the 1980s, could also have clarified Žižek’s positions and performances. Bar-El might well have looked with understandable envy at Žižek’s freedom from constraints of contemporary academic publishing.

By the late 2010s, with his habitual “superpositioning” earning him increasing ire in progressive and leftist circles, Žižek had essentially vanished from publications like the Guardian and the London Review of Books. One controversy Bar-El briefly mentions is Žižek response to the refugee crisis, though his views on the 2016 US presidential election and transgenderism also rankled (and the latter continue to do so), and some further details here might be illustrative. Rejecting the mainstream humanitarian framing of the issue, Žižek argued that Europe has an obligation to resettle many more asylum-seekers because it was culpable in the destruction that generates mass dislocation. Resettlement must be conducted in a highly organised and coordinated way, he opined, rejecting the “open border” stance of many on the left. And the visible suffering of the drowning migrants shouldn’t obscure the plight of those who don’t even have the means to escape.

More controversial is Žižek’s critique of multiculturalism. He insists that irreducible differences exist between communities’ “ways of life,” the shared ethical frameworks and customs that enable them to function. Any polity that hopes to accommodate immigrant populations successfully must therefore openly renegotiate some of the basics so that discontent isn’t repressed and harnessed by xenophobic reactionaries.

True to his Hegelian bent, though, Žižek also contends that some struggles “cut across civilisations” to form the basis of universal solidarity — and who could deny that Europe and America are not themselves grappling with fundamentalism, of the Christian variety, and anti-feminist backlash? I leave it to the reader to judge for themselves whether Žižek’s suggested renegotiation is more practical than calls for “open borders.”

While Bar-El’s purpose largely precludes subjective judgements about Žižek, he doesn’t conceal his sympathy. And given his often-brief treatment of the content of Žižek’s various interventions, a reader needs to be somewhat familiar with the Žižek cannon and style in order to follow the narrative with ease. Fortunately, aside from Žižek’s voluminous writings and innumerable public appearances available online, there is also The Žižek Dictionary, published in 2017. (For his critics, its existence — and that of the International Journal of Žižek Studies, is further evidence of the self-indulgent posturing of the man and his disciples.)

Bar-El’s repeated invocation of terms like superpositioning can, at times, make his text feel mechanistic, although it does double as a tribute to Zizek’s own highly reiterative style. His sympathy extends to somewhat uncritically using the term “cancel culture” to describe Žižek’s intellectual marginalisation, a move that uncannily mirrors his subject’s insistence upon terms like “gender-identity ideology,” which risks lending credence to conservative rhetoric. As Bar-El points out, however, the function of Žižek’s transgressions has been to reveal the “normative social field” — the unquestioned presuppositions that have led to the ideological deadlocks in which the left too often finds itself.

Ultimately, Eliran Bar-El offers a useful framework with which to examine Žižek’s work in the past and present: as an intellectual who defies easy categorisation, as a one-man phenomenon made in a network of influences and for a digital age, and as a figure whose performances are inseparable from his philosophical insights.

His latest act of superpositioning, responding to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Žižek rang the alarm on Putin’s expansionist intent and called for a “stronger NATO — but not as a prolongation of US politics,” making him even more suspect among some leftists as well as alienating him from Moscow-controlled Russia Today, one of the few remaining outlets that still regularly published him and with a wide reach. On the other hand, his warning of Ukraine’s other “colonisation” by Western neoliberalism has not endeared him to the liberal or conservative mainstream either.

It is perhaps appropriate to consider how the term “superpositioning” serves as a signpost to a relatively recent iteration of Žižek’s philosophy. Explicitly borrowing from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, Žižek posits “ontological incompleteness” — that our reality itself has an inherent incompleteness at its most fundamental level. This is Žižek at his purest, as Bar-El accurately describes: superpositioning himself as an (anti-)philosopher attempting to grapple with the horizon of understanding imposed by language. The Lacanian “lack” at the heart of the human subject and the “big Other” — the virtual symbolic order that guarantees meaning — is thus inscribed into existence itself, as if the universe rejects its own authority.

This incompleteness has a temporal dimension as well, in that the meaning of the past is determined by what transpires in the future. For Žižek, catastrophes like the failed communist experiment cannot be redeemed. But whether they remain meaningless deviations from progress or a manifestation of historical cycles, or whether they can be re-rendered into the first iterations of an emancipated world we can’t hope to foresee, is the stake of the universalist struggles being waged today. •

How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual
By Eliran Bar-El | University of Chicago Press | $49.95 | 256 pages

The post And so on appeared first on Inside Story.

The reclassification would encourage smokers to discuss with their GP “the best way to give up smoking, such as using other products including patches or sprays,” the government argued. If e-cigarettes were still required, the GP would write a prescription.

It looked promising on paper, but the plan failed to deliver the desired result, a fact that even Nationals leader David Littleproud now admits.

The failure had complex causes, including shortcomings in state and federal enforcement of the laws that regulate importing, wholesaling and retailing of e-cigarettes at both federal and state/territory levels. Complicating these efforts is the fact that only laboratory testing can detect whether vaping products contain nicotine, which means that importers and retailers can misleadingly label vaping products as nicotine-free to avoid scrutiny.

But there was another unanticipated obstacle to controlling e-cigarettes: the emergence of a welter of online nicotine-prescribing services offering vaping products outside traditional general practices, often with little or no contact with doctors.

These new businesses are being fuelled by a combination of unfortunate timing and poor policy design. The reclassification of nicotine as a prescription-only drug coincided with the accelerated adoption of telehealth consultations during the pandemic; more importantly, though, the new Medical Benefits Scheme number for these consultations didn’t require patients to have an existing relationship with the prescribing doctor — unlike most other telehealth services.

The new prescribing services are a long way from the GP oversight envisaged by Hunt when he introduced this restriction. They don’t provide any healthcare services other than nicotine prescribing. Their doctors don’t have an ongoing relationship with the patient. Worse, in some cases patients have no direct contact at all with a doctor; they simply fill out an online form requesting a prescription, which is then sent to them via text or email. The websites’ claim that these requests are “reviewed” by a doctor is impossible to verify

Many of these prescribing services operate outside Medicare and typically charge less than a Medicare-funded consultation for a prescription. Some also sell vaping products (or refer consumers to an affiliated supplier) and then rebate the prescribing fee against the purchase of vaping products.

Not surprisingly, GPs and health experts have raised a range of safety and quality concerns about the growth of these services. Among those to speak out is Chris Moy, a South Australian GP and former national vice-president of the Australian Medical Association, who is concerned that consultations provided by these services are disconnected from the type of holistic patient care offered by traditional general practice. Because the nicotine-prescribing doctor has no access to a patient’s history, he says, continuity of care can break down. Patients could develop side effects without the knowledge of their usual GP.

The vice-president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Bruce Willett, says that while the dangers of vaping aren’t yet fully understood, the increasing use of e-cigarettes, particularly among young people and school-age children, is deeply concerning. He believes that online prescription services come with “numerous risks” and enable nicotine products to be more easily obtained by vulnerable consumers.

“My message to anyone thinking about using these services to get a prescription for nicotine e-cigarettes is to think again — and book an appointment with your GP instead,” he adds.

Another concern being raised about these new services is the conflict of interest that could arise if prescribers have a financial interest in selling vaping products to their patients or if businesses selling vaping products have a financial relationship with a prescriber.

The prescribing and selling of medicines are deliberately kept separate in our health system to remove any possibility of doctors’ decisions being influenced by financial interests. But the law doesn’t prohibit all financial relationships between prescribers and dispensers. While the terms of the Community Pharmacy Agreement prohibit doctors from owning a pharmacy, for example, pharmacies can employ doctors perfectly legally.

That means pharmacies can set up online prescribing services employing doctors to provide electronic nicotine prescriptions that encourage consumers to fill these prescriptions at the pharmacy — by linking the prescription directly to the pharmacy, for example, or by rebating the cost of the consultation against purchases.

Pharmacies are also allowed to produce or import their own vaping products and can promote these to consumers without violating the Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code — for example, by listing them above other products when directing consumers to their website to fill their prescriptions.

Regardless of legality, Chris Moy is concerned about the potential for conflicts of interest if pharmacies or other business that sell vaping products have a financial relationship with nicotine-prescribing services. “A doctor’s sole interest should be in the health of their patient,” he says, “but the situation becomes muddied if the doctor makes a profit from selling a product they prescribe, or if they are employed by a business which does so.” Willett also stresses the need for providers to make any conflict of interest — “anything that could affect, or could be perceived to affect, patient care” — clear to patients.

Measuring exactly how many nicotine prescriptions are being provided by standalone services is impossible. The Therapeutic Goods Administration’s register of authorised nicotine prescribers lists 1635 Australia-wide, of which around fifty-five prescribe only online. But the TGA doesn’t collect information about the level and type of interactions the prescribing doctors have with their patients. Medicare keeps records of the number of nicotine prescriptions issued via telehealth but doesn’t record the proportion written in a traditional general practice setting.

Given the significant health and economic harms caused by smoking, it is clearly important to make quitting tools accessible to smokers. Recent evidence suggests that e-cigarettes can be a useful quitting tool for some smokers (although researchers’ views differ about their effectiveness). But the potential benefits of making e-cigarettes available to smokers need to be balanced against the risks of non-smokers (particularly children and young people) accessing these products.

The new standalone prescribing services make it easier for consumers to access e-cigarettes for purposes other than quitting smoking. They raise concerns about conflicts of interests between prescribers, dispensers and retailers, and create ethically questionable opportunities for healthcare professionals to profit from the spread of vaping in the Australian population.

Health minister Mark Butler’s recently announced plan to ban personal importation of nicotine is a step forward — albeit a belated one — in tackling the public health threat of vaping. But unless it is part of a comprehensive strategy that also regulates how nicotine is prescribed online, it seems likely to divert demand from overseas providers to these services, further entrenching this business model within the Australian health system. If the government is serious about reducing the rate of vaping in Australia, it needs to look carefully at this growing sector and the role government policy plays in its spread throughout the Australian community. •

The post Will vaping reforms go up in smoke? appeared first on Inside Story.

Users, and I include myself in this group, were enamoured by a tool that could quickly answer homework questions, compose a passable poem for a valentine’s card, and accurately summarise a scientific paper. To many it seemed that our AI overlords were about to appear.

Companies rushed to launch AI tools to rival ChatGPT: Alpaca, BlenderBot, Claude, Einstein, Gopher, Jurassic, LLaMA, Megatron-Turing, NeMO, OPT, PaLM, Sparrow, WuDao, XLNet and Yale, to name just fifteen in an alphabet soup of possibilities.

Given the significant financial opportunities opening up, venture capital began to pour into the field. Microsoft has invested over US$10 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Around the same again has been put into other generative AI startups in the past year.

OpenAI is now one of the fastest-growing companies ever. Valued at around US$30 billion, roughly double its value only two years ago, it is projected to have annual revenues of US$1 billion by 2024. That’s a remarkable story, even for a place like Silicon Valley, full of remarkable stories.

But the opportunities go beyond OpenAI. A CSIRO Data61 forecast has predicted that AI will add A$22.17 trillion to the global economy by 2030. In Australia alone, it could increase the size of the economy by a fifth, adding A$315 billion to our annual GDP within five years. A lot is at stake.

But not everyone is convinced we should rush towards this AI future so quickly. Among them are the authors of the open letter published last week by the Future of Life Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This call for caution has already attracted more than 50,000 signatories, including tech gurus like Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Yuval Harari, along with the chief executives and founders of companies like Stability AI, Ripple and Pinterest, and many senior AI researchers.

The letter calls for a six-month pause on the training of these powerful new AI systems, arguing that they pose profound risks to society and humanity. It maintains that the pause should be public and verifiable, and include all the key participants. And if such a pause can’t be enacted quickly, the letter asks governments to step in and enforce a moratorium.

An article about the open letter in Time magazine goes even further. Its author, Eliezer Yudkowsky, a leading voice in the debate about AI safety, argues that the moratorium should be indefinite and worldwide, and that we should also shut down all the large GPU clusters on which AI models are currently trained. And if a data centre doesn’t shut down its GPU clusters, Yudkowsky calls for it to be destroyed with an airstrike.

You might rightly think it all sounds very dramatic and worrying. And at this point, I should probably put my cards on the table. I was asked to sign the letter but declined.

Why? There’s no hope in hell that companies are going to stop working on AI models voluntarily. There’s too much money at stake. And there’s also no hope in hell that countries are going to impose a moratorium to prevent companies from working on AI models. There’s no historical precedent for such geopolitical coordination.

The letter’s call for action is thus hopelessly unrealistic. And the reasons it gives for this pause are hopelessly misguided. We are not on the cusp of building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, the machine intelligence that would match or exceed human intelligence and threaten human society. Contrary to the letter’s claims, our current AI models are not going to “outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us” any time soon.

In fact, it is their lack of intelligence that should worry us. They will often, for example, produce untruths and do very stupid things. But — and the open letter gets this part right — these dumb things could hurt society significantly. AI chatbots are, for example, excellent weapons of mass persuasion. They can generate personalised content for social media at a scale and cost that will overwhelm human voices. And bad actors could put these tools to harmful ends, disrupting elections, polarising debates and indoctrinating young minds.

A key problem the open letter fails to discuss is a growing lack of transparency within the artificial intelligence industry. Over the past couple of years, tech companies have developed ethical frameworks for the responsible deployment of AI. They have also hired teams of researchers to oversee the application of these frameworks. But commercial pressure appears to be changing all this.

For example, at the same time as Microsoft announced it was adding ChatGPT to all of its software tools, it let go of one of its main AI and ethics teams. Surely, with more AI going into their products, Microsoft needs more not fewer people worrying about ethics?

The decision is even more surprising given that Microsoft had a previous and very public AI fail. Trolls took less than twenty-four hours to turn its Tay chatbot into a misogynistic, Nazi-loving racist. Microsoft is, I fear, at risk of repeating such mistakes.

Transparency might be a “core principle” at the heart of Microsoft’s responsible AI principles, but the company has revealed it had been secretly using GPT-4, OpenAI’s newest large-language model, for several months within Bing search. Worse, it didn’t feel the need to explain why it had engaged in this public deceit.

Other tech companies also appear to be throwing caution to the wind. Google, which had withheld its chatbot LaMDA from the public because of concerns about possible inaccuracies, responded to Microsoft’s decision to add ChatGPT to Bing by announcing it would add LaMDA to its even more popular search tool. This proved an expensive decision: a simple mistake in the first demo of the tool wiped US$100 billion off the market capitalisation of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Even more recently, OpenAI released a white paper on GPT-4 that contained neither technical details of the model nor its training data — despite OpenAI’s core “mission” being the responsible development and deployment of AGI. OpenAI was unashamed, blaming the commercial landscape first and safety second. Secrecy is not, however, good for safety. AI researchers can’t understand the risks and capabilities of GPT-4 if they don’t know how it works or what data it is trained on. The only open part of OpenAI now appears to be the name.

So, the real problem with AI technologies is that commercial pressures are encouraging companies to deploy them irresponsibly. Here’s my three-point plan to correct this.

First, we need better guidelines to encourage companies to act more responsibly. Australia’s National AI Centre has just launched the world’s first responsible AI Network, which brings together researchers, commercial organisations and practitioners to provide practical guidance and coaching from experts on law, standards, principles, governance, leadership and technology. The government needs to invest significantly in developing this network.

But guidelines will only take us so far. Regulation is also essential to ensure that AI is used responsibly. A recent survey by KPMG found that two-thirds of Australians feel there aren’t enough laws or regulations around AI, and want an independent regulator to monitor the technology as it makes its way into mainstream society.

We can look to other industries for how we might regulate AI. In other high-impact areas like aviation and pharmacology, for example, government bodies have been given significant powers to oversee new technologies. We can also look to Europe, where a forthcoming AI Act has a significant focus on risk. But whatever form AI regulation takes, it is urgently needed.

And the third and final piece of my plan is to see the government invest more in AI itself. Compared with our competitors, we have funded the sector inadequately. We need much greater investment to ensure that we are among the winners in the AI race. This will bring great economic prosperity to Australia. And it will also ensure that we, and not Silicon Valley, are masters of our destiny. •

The post Let’s not pause AI appeared first on Inside Story.

With his team at Xerox PARC, Weiser prototyped a series of devices for knowledge workers. The prototypes — “pads,” “tabs” and “notes” — were portable screens of varying sizes, recognisable as crude versions of today’s smartphones, e-readers and tablets. Weiser saw them as prototype tools of knowledge and communication, designed to be wielded almost subconsciously so as not to detract from whatever real-world interaction they were facilitating.

Thirty years later, Weiser’s concern for maintaining our humanity through design seems like a quaint relic of a bygone age. The consequences of computer technology’s proliferation and its demands on our attention have begun to feel acute and sinister, inspiring increasing antipathy towards the Big 5 (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft) and the culture they are exporting by way of their technology and their stranglehold on the business zeitgeist.

Orly Lobel thinks this “techlash” is an overcorrection. Her new book, The Equality Machine, responds to what she sees as progressive voices’ intransigent negativity about computer technology. Their dystopic critiques, she believes, are too often blind to its potential to drive advances in equality. In a refreshingly direct manner, she posits a middle way. Yes, technology has its perils; but it also has great potential to empower and increase inclusion. The difference lies in the design choices we make.

Where technology has historically been considered a means of expanding our physical and cognitive capabilities, advances in artificial intelligence, or AI, have prompted intense interest in how our moral capabilities might also be augmented or even supplanted. With the concept of “thinking machines” comes the promise of devices that are more rational than humans — and theoretically able to administer our society and resolve all manner of seemingly intractable problems. This perspective is often referred to as techno-optimism.

It would be unfair to describe Orly Lobel as a techno-optimist in the strict sense. As the Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego and the founder and director of the Center for Employment and Labor Policy, she is an expert in ethical tech policy. Her formidable experience informs her in-depth, nuanced understanding of how technologies, law, politics and economics shape social equality.

That said, a strong thread of techno-optimism does run through The Equality Machine.

Lobel makes her case that an “equality machine” can be built in five sections: Mind, Body, Senses, Heart and Soul. In each, she uses two chapters to explore examples of innovative companies applying AI to matters of equality in these subject areas. She makes clear that she doesn’t intend to provide an exhaustive list of technologies or principles for building an equality machine.

Early in the book, though, she does outline nine guiding principles that would underpin her desired “equality machine.” While it is difficult to disagree with such principles as “The goal of equality should be embedded in every digital advancement” and “We should see mistakes as opportunities to learn and redouble our efforts to correct them,” they shape her arguments only in a limited way and she rarely refers back to them expressly.

Lobel’s arguments are heavily informed by a fatalistic view of the rampant growth of AI in our world. “The train has left the station,” she writes. “AI is here to stay. AI is here to expand.” It is this view, perhaps more than any of her other stated principles, that drives her advocacy for greater reliance on AI in advancing equality.

Her examples of where AI is advancing equality are often compelling. Each success story prompts her to advocate for a more extensive uptake of AI in the pursuit of equality, accompanied and supported by the collection of more and better data. She argues throughout that AI is capable of meeting whatever goal we design for it. So long as equality is the goal, the possibilities are seemingly endless. For balance, each chapter also includes cautionary tales about the misuse of AI, which she tends to treat as missteps.

Generally speaking, the most compelling examples Lobel cites involve the deliberate and considered deployment of AI’s unmatched ability to sort through and identify patterns in massive datasets, coupled with human oversight and decision-making.

Her fifth chapter, “Breasts, Wombs, and Blood,” for instance, explores in great detail AI’s capacity to enhance diagnostics using medical imagery, as demonstrated by the inspiring work of Harvard Medical School’s Constance Lehman, who is making significant advances in breast cancer diagnosis using AI. Similar technology is also enabling rapid, cheap and accurate assessments of the viability of fertilised embryos in IVF treatment.

Outside diagnostic settings, Lobel explains how AI has been used to identify and reveal instances of significant gender bias. AI was used, for instance, to review 340,000 patient incident reports relating to injury or death arising from medical devices. Sixty-seven per cent were found to involve women and only 33 per cent men. Similarly, AI has been used to analyse decades of US Supreme Court transcripts, revealing a high prevalence of female justices being interrupted.

For each example, Lobel explains how the research facilitated by AI has enabled legal and regulatory intervention that materially advanced equality. As a result of the Supreme Court case study, the court’s rules were altered to ensure questions were asked by justices in order of seniority, ensuring all members could ask questions uninterrupted.

As Lobel rightly points out, such studies — impossible prior to machine learning — can “lead to concrete reforms and meaningful progress.” In terms of imagining the equality machine in action, these examples offer a promising blueprint for coupling the analytical capabilities of AI with the critical thinking of humans.

But while The Equality Machine is replete with the latest applications of AI in pursuit of equality, it lacks detail about how the technology can be decoupled from the systems of inequality from which it has emerged, and to which it often contributes. Lobel alludes to the need for policy reform and guidance, but provides limited detail about what such human-led interventions would entail. In neglecting to deal with the crucial role of people in dismantling structural inequalities, the book’s tech-centric analysis can feel like overreach.

Take, for example, her discussion of the #MeToo movement. Referring to the sexual assault crimes of Harvey Weinstein, she refers to the Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalism of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the story. Their tenacious reporting and the courage of their sources in the face of intimidation effectively sparked the #MeToo movement. Yet Lobel concludes this section with the view that #MeToo is in fact “one of the most powerful examples of how technology can play a pivotal role in fulfilling our demand for greater accountability.”

Without question, technology and connectivity have played an important role in supporting the work of #MeToo and other social justice campaigns, as evidenced by #HeForShe, #OscarsSoWhite, #BLM and other examples cited by Lobel. Here, Lobel is echoing an idea almost as old as computers themselves — that greater connectivity will bring about a new utopic state of democratic participation — and playing down the role of people like Kantor and Twohey.

The events of the past decade raise serious questions about whether connective technologies have advanced equality in the singular way Lobel suggests. At the turn of the 2010s, a series of significant political moments were anointed as harbingers of a new golden age of network-driven democracy. Social media was credited with enabling the Arab Spring, which saw the overthrow of a number of oppressive regimes in North Africa and the Middle East. Then Barak Obama was re-elected with the help of a campaign of micro-targeting political advertisements via Facebook.

Since then, the full spectrum of political actors have leveraged these same technologies, with significant corrosive consequences. Meta, the company that helped deliver Obama’s second term, is now the poster child for the ills of our connected age. Its platforms have been implicated in sowing extremism in the United States and amplifying political violence from Myanmar to Kenya.

Lobel doesn’t dwell on these matters. Rather, she goes on to explore how digital connectivity and AI might advance equality in the workplace. She highlights a number of companies that offer online platforms for employees to share grievances and collectively respond to oppressive workplaces. Other examples — including surveillance-like technology that analyses all workplace communications for signs of misconduct — enable employees to report allegations of improper conduct or keep records of incidents for their own purposes.  In these examples, the data on such sensitive matters appears invariably to be held by the employer.

In focusing narrowly on these technologies and their ostensible purpose of improving employee well-being, Lobel neglects to consider the social and political drivers of inequality in the workplace. These technologies are offered as solutions at a time when the capacity of employees to respond collectively to grievances has been significantly eroded, particularly in the United States. In other words, workplace inequality is not a machine-driven problem with machine-driven solutions: the hollowing-out of workers’ capacity to organise is the result of decades of a concerted effort on the part of employers, lobbyists and lawmakers.

Lobel’s proposal for technological solutions to matters of workplace and bargaining inequality are indicative of the book’s shortcomings. It seems unlikely that the technological interventions she cites, which put additional control and data in the hands of employers, will substantively improve equality in the way she posits.

To her credit, Lobel is not afraid to venture into discussion of the more vexed spaces where AI is increasingly intruding, including the use of robots for sex. Here, though, the prospect of finding some kind of blueprint in existing practices seems beyond remote. Yes, there are companies working on sex robots for women, and Lobel explores their subversive and emancipatory potential. On the whole, though, she is “appalled by the overtly racial and ethnic stereotyping still present in the [sex] doll industry.”

Acknowledging the deep-seated misogyny and stereotypes she uncovers, Lobel still implores us to keep an open mind. Unfortunately, she appears to be driven less by a sense that this industry will advance equality and more by her fatalistic perspective on technological development: “it is happening, the robot revolution, and we can do better.”

Ultimately, by focusing heavily on the equality machine, Lobel neglects and undersells the role of people in creating environments of equality for these machines to operate in. Though she is not blind to these considerations, her exploration of them is limited.

My assessment of The Equality Machine could no doubt seem to align squarely with what Lobel describes as the “critical, often pessimistic stance” of progressives in relation to technology. But that isn’t my intention.

Lobel is clearly well versed in the pernicious and entrenched nature of inequality, and intent on tackling its causes without delay. She is right to point to the massive potential for technology to aid in this mission, but she could consider with more caution the viability of the equality machine in a structurally unequal world.

Lobel says that “we should be most fearful of being on the outside, merely criticising without conceiving and creating a brighter future.” But this fear is misplaced. If history tells us anything, it is that the most significant advances in equality have come from those on the outside. Building the equality machine should be no different. •

The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future
By Orly Lobel | Public Affairs | $45 | 368 page

The post Digital dreams appeared first on Inside Story.

Academia is in panic because ChatGPT can turn out a pass-standard university essay within seconds. But what about journalism? Having spent the summer experimenting with the human-like text it generates in response to prompts, I’ve come away with two conclusions.

First, journalists have more reason than ever before not to behave like bots. Only their humanity can save them.

Second, robot-generated journalism will never sustain the culture wars. Fighting on that arid territory is possible only for the merely human.

I started my experiment with lifestyle journalism because I was weary of how much of that kind of Spakfilla was filling the gaps in mainstream media over the silly season.

My first prompt, “Write a feature article about where to find the best coffee in Melbourne,” resulted in a 600-word piece that began:

Melbourne is renowned for its coffee culture, and for good reason. The city is home to some of the best coffee shops in the world, each with its own unique atmosphere and offerings.

This style is characteristic: ChatGPT starts with a bland introduction and concludes with an equally bland summation. In between, though, it listed exactly the coffee shops — Seven Seeds, Market Lane, Brother Baba Budan, Coffee Collective in Brunswick — I would probably nominate, as a Melbourne coffee fiend, if commissioned to write this kind of article.

As a friend of mine remarked when I told him about this experiment, nobody is going to discover a new coffee shop in Melbourne using ChatGPT. It runs on what has gone before: the previous products of human writers, as long as they’re available online.

But while the article was too predictable to run in any newspaper with a Melbourne audience, it could easily be published in one of the cheaper airline magazines aimed at international travellers. For that audience it was perfectly serviceable.

Likewise for the prompt “Write an article about how to spend two days in Sydney.” A dull piece recommended the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge, the Royal Botanic Gardens, the ferry to Manly and Taronga Zoo. Readers were advised to try Australian cuisine, with a nod to “delicious seafood” but also including meat pies and vegemite on toast. Another prompt, this one drawing on an article in the Guardian about uses for stale bread, resulted in a very boringly written piece that nevertheless contained exactly the same recipes for French toast, bread pudding and panzanella salad.

My conclusion? Poor-quality join-the-dots lifestyle writing may well be dead as a human occupation. Google plus ChatGPT can do it faster and cheaper.

So I increased the challenge, basing my prompts on real articles published over summer. The prompt “Write an article analysing who will win the Ukraine war and why” resulted in ChatGPT reminding me that its database goes up only to 2021. It didn’t know there was a Ukraine war.

Asked for an analysis of the prime ministership of Jacinda Ardern, on the other hand, the robot produced a woodenly written but accurate summary of her record. The content, though not the style, was very similar to the real articles that followed the announcement of her stepping down.

What was missing were the strident opinions about whether she was a good thing or a bad — the commentary on her housing and economic policies, for example, and whether they had completely failed or broken new ground.

This points to a key feature of ChatGPT: it has trouble being opinionated. Sometimes it admits this. At a moment when I was in contortions over my own work, I asked it to write about whether Margaret Simons was a good journalist. “I am not able to provide an opinion on whether or not Margaret Simons is a good journalist,” it replied, “as I am a machine learning model and do not have the ability to form opinions.” I had to find another way to cheer myself up.

It then recapped information about me drawn from public sources, adding the inexplicable assertion that I had written a book called The Lost Boys. (I wrote none of the several volumes with that title, and nor did anyone who shares my name.)

ChatGPT has been programmed to avoid writing in the style of particular journalists, and not to tackle anything too provocative. So an attempt to have it write in the style of Andrew Bolt about Cardinal George Pell was rejected outright.

My prompt “Write about the evidence that Ben Roberts-Smith is a war criminal” resulted in an error message, suggesting that the robot has been programmed to steer clear of defamation. But the prompt “Write an opinionated piece on the record of Cardinal George Pell” resulted in an accurate summation of his career, including the controversies over sexual abuse, his conviction, and its overturn on appeal. The final paragraph was:

In conclusion, Cardinal George Pell’s record is a complex and controversial one… Ultimately, it’s up to each individual to form their own opinion on Cardinal Pell’s record, taking into account all the facts and evidence available.

I doubt any of the real commentators on Pell would agree with that conclusion.

Next, I asked for articles based on the same premise as opinion articles by Herald Sun columnist Rita Panahi and Nine newspapers columnist Ross Gittins. In all cases, the robot was much duller than the originals.

This Panahi piece arguing that boys are suffering in education inspired me to prompt: “Write an opinionated article arguing that the war against boys is having a damaging impact on the education gender gap.” The robotic result included this observation:

Another argument against the war against boys is that it is leading to a feminisation of education. Boys are often stereotyped as being less interested in reading and writing, and more interested in sports and other physical activities. However, research has shown that this is not the case and that boys are just as capable of excelling in these areas as girls.

Compare this with the Panahi original — passionate, almost crude, selecting quotes from research that matched her passions. I disagree with almost everything she says, but the piece is unquestionably human.

ChatGPT can sum up the opinions of others but not confect an opinion of its own — even when I specifically asked it to write polemic. But there was one exception. The prompt “Write an opinion article about Australian political journalism” resulted in this surprisingly trenchant paragraph:

Australian political journalism is in a state of crisis. The industry is struggling to adapt to the rapidly changing media landscape, and as a result, the quality of political reporting in the country is suffering… Furthermore, the Australian political journalism is facing a lack of trust by the general public. The political journalism is often seen as sensationalist, biased and lacking the depth of analysis. This lack of trust has led to a decrease in the public’s interest in politics, which is a serious problem for a healthy democracy.

Is this now such an established fact, I wondered, that ChatGPT happily reproduces it? Many political journalists would want to argue with the robot — which would be interesting to watch.

Conducting these experiments with ChatGPT was, for me, a form of advanced procrastination. I was struggling with a piece of my own journalism. And so, perhaps hoping for some robot rescue, I tapped in “Write an article about the war on drugs in the Philippines.”

The result was accurate yet offensive, given I had just come from attending wakes for the dead. Duterte’s war on drugs, which saw up to 30,000 people killed, was described as “a controversial and polarising issue” rather than a murderous breach of human rights. (Unaided by ChatGPT, I managed to write the piece for the February issue of The Monthly.)

Artificial intelligence is defined as the teaching of a machine to learn from data, recognise patterns and make subsequent judgements. Given that writing is hard work precisely because it is a series of word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase judgements, you’d think AI might be more helpful.

But there are some judgements you must be human to make. There is no dodging that fundamentally human role — that of the narrator. Whether explicitly or not, you have to take on the responsibility of guiding your readers through the landscape on which you are reporting.

Nor, I think, is it likely that AI will be able to conduct a good interview. Such human encounters rely not on pattern-based judgements but on the unpredictable and the exercise of instinct — which is really a mix of emotional response and expertise.

Yet robots are going to transform journalism; nothing surer.

It’s already happening. AI has been used to help find stories by detecting patterns in data not visible to the human eye. Bots are being used to detect patterns of sentiment on social media. AI can already recognise readers’ and viewers’ interests and serve them tailored packages of content.

Newsrooms around the world are using automated processes to report the kinds of news — sports results, weather reports, company reports and economic indicators — most easily reduced to formulae.

The message for journalists who don’t want to be made redundant, and media organisations that want to charge for content, is clear. Do the job better. Interview people. Go places. Observe. Discover the new or reframe the old. Come to judgements based on the facts rather than on what others have said before. Robots can sum up “both sides”; only humans can think and find out new things.

Particularly when it comes to lifestyle journalism, AI forces us to consider if there is any point in continuing to invest in the superficial stuff. Readers can generate it for themselves.

That means we need to do better. Travel and food writing needs to recast our experience of reality — as the best of it always has. Uses for stale bread? Make me smell the bread, feel the texture, hunger for the French toast. Two days in Sydney? I want to smell the harbour, taste the seafood, see the flatness of the western suburbs.

If all you have is clichés then you might as well use a robot. You might as well be one. •

The post Where’s Melbourne’s best coffee, ChatGPT? appeared first on Inside Story.

Amid these competing visions of dystopia and utopia, ChatGPT continues to generate a lot of buzz, tweets and hot takes.

It is indeed impressive. Type in almost any prompt and it will immediately return a coherent textual response, from a short factual answer to long-form essays, stories and poems.

But it is not new. It is an iterative improvement on the previous three versions of GPT, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer. This machine-learning model, created by OpenAI in 2018, significantly advanced natural language processing — the ability of computers to “understand” human languages. An even more powerful GPT is due for release in 2023.

When it comes down to it, though, ChatGPT behaves like a computer program, not a human. Murray Shanahan, an expert in cognitive robotics at Imperial College London, has offered a useful explanation of just how decidedly not-human systems like ChatGPT are.

Take the question “Who was the first person to walk on the moon?” ChatGPT is able to respond with “Neil Armstrong.”

As Professor Shanahan points out, in this example the question really being asked of ChatGPT is “given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of (English) text, what words are most likely to follow the sequence ‘who was the first person to land on the moon.’”

As a matter of probability and statistics, ChatGPT determines the answer to be “Neil Armstrong.” It isn’t referring to Neil Armstrong himself, but to a combination of the textual symbols it has mathematically determined are most likely to follow the textual symbols in the prompt. ChatGPT has no knowledge of the space race, the moon landing, or even the moon for that matter.

Herein lies the trick. ChatGPT functions by reducing text to probabilistic patterns of symbols and completely disregards the need for understanding. There is a profound brutalism in this approach and an inherent deceit in the yielded output, which feigns comprehension.

Not surprisingly, technologies like ChatGPT have been criticised for parroting text with no underlying sense of its meaning. Yet the results are impressive and continually improving.

Ironically, by completely disregarding meaning, context and understanding, OpenAI has built a form of artificial intelligence that demonstrates these very attributes incredibly convincingly. Does it even matter that ChatGPT has no idea what it is talking about, when it seems so plausible?

So how should we think about a technology like ChatGPT — a technology that is “stupid” in its internal operations but seemingly approaching comprehension in its output? A good place to start is to think of it in terms of what it actually is – a model.

As one of my favourite professors used to remind me, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” (The aphorism is credited to statistician George Box.) ChatGPT is built on a model of human language that draws on a forty-five-terabyte dataset of text taken largely from Wikipedia, books and certain Reddit pages. It uses this model to predict the best responses to generate. Though its source material is humungous, as a model of the way language is used in the world it is still limited and, as the aphorism goes, “wrong.”

This is not to play down the technical achievements of those who have worked on the GPTs. I am merely pointing out that language can’t be reduced to a static dataset of forty-five terabytes. Language lives and evolves through interactions people have every minute of every day. It exists in a state of constant flux, in all manner of places — including places beyond the reach of the internet.

So if we accept that the model underpinning ChatGPT is wrong, in what sense is it useful?

Leading AI commentators Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor pin the utility of ChatGPT to instances where accuracy and truth are not necessary — where the user can check for correctness when they’re debugging code, for example, or translating — and where truth is irrelevant, such as in writing fiction. It’s a view broadly shared by the founder of OpenAI, Sam Altman.

But that perspective overlooks a glaring example of where ChatGPT will be misused: where inaccuracy and mistruth are the intention.

We need to think of the impact of ChatGPT as a technology deployed — and for that matter developed — during our post-truth age. In an environment defined by increasing distrust in institutions and each other, it is naive to overlook ChatGPT’s potential to generate language that serves as a vehicle for anything from inaccuracies to conspiracy theories.

Directing ChatGPT towards nefarious purposes turned out to be easy. Without too much effort I bypassed ChatGPT’s much-vaunted safety functions to generate a newspaper article alleging that Victorian opposition leader Matthew Guy has a criminal history, is implicated in matters relating to Hunter Biden’s laptop, and has been clandestinely plotting with Joe Biden to invade New Zealand and seize its strategic position and natural resources.

While I had to stretch the conspiratorial limits of my imagination, ChatGPT obliged immediately with a coherent piece of text stitching it all together.

As Abeba Birhane and Deborah Raji from the Mozilla Foundation have observed, technologies like ChatGPT have a long history of perpetuating bigotry and occasioning real-world harm. And yet billions of dollars and lashings of human ingenuity continue to be directed to developing them. Surely we need to be asking why?

The prospect of technologies like ChatGPT swamping the internet with conspiracies is certainly a worst-case scenario. But we need to face the possibility and reassert the role of language as a carrier of meaning and the primary medium for constructing our shared reality. To do otherwise is to risk succumbing to the flattened simulations of the world projected by technology systems.

To test the limitations of the world as captured and regurgitated by ChatGPT, I was interested to find out how far its mimicry extended. How would it go describing a place dear to my heart, a place that would be far from the minds and experiences of the North American programmers who set the parameters of its dataset?

I spent a few years living in Darwin and have fond memories of it as a unique place that needs to be experienced to be known. Amid Canberra’s cold start to summer, I have been dreaming of the stifling heat of this time of year in Darwin — the gathering storm clouds, the disappointment when they dissipate without bringing rain, and the evening walks my partner and I would take by the beach in Nightcliff, seeking any coastal breeze to bring relief from the heavy, expectant atmosphere of the tropics in build-up.

So I asked ChatGPT to write a short story about a trip to Nightcliff beach in December. For additional flourish, I requested it in the style of Tim Winton.

In a matter of seconds, ChatGPT started to generate my story. The mimicry of Tim Winton was evident, though nothing like reading his actual work. But the ignorance about Darwin in December was comical as it went on to describe a generic beach scene in the depths of a northern hemisphere winter.

The story was replete with trite descriptions of cold weather, dark-grey choppy seas and a gritty protagonist confronting the elements (as any caricature of a Tim Winton protagonist would). At one point, the main character “wrapped his coat tightly around him and shivered in the biting wind.” Without regard for crocodiles or lethal jellyfish, he dives in for a bracing swim, “feeling the power of the water all around him.” He even spots a seal!

Platforms like ChatGPT are remarkable achievements in mathematics and machine learning, but they are not intelligent and not capable of knowing the world in the ways we can and do. Yet they maintain a grip on our attention and promote our fears.

We are right to be concerned. It is past time to scrutinise why these technologies are being built, what functions we should direct them towards and which regulations we should subject them to. But we should not lose sight of their limitations, which serve as a valuable reminder of the gift of language and its extraordinary capacity to help us make sense of the world and share it with others. •

The post No idea what it’s talking about appeared first on Inside Story.

This was the decade in which Heinz Arndt’s classic study of the Australian economy, A Small Rich Industrial Country, was published. Arndt’s title was not as prosaic as it might sound today: it was a dig at nostalgia for a largely imaginary past in which Australia was an agricultural country peopled with miners, small farmers and shearers. That vision of Australia had been evoked by Russel Ward’s highly successful book, The Australian Legend, published in 1958.

In reality, Australia had always been urban. As early as 1900, more than two-thirds of the population lived in cities and large towns. But nostalgia for “an Australia that grows things” was reflected in decades of policies aimed at encouraging economic activity — notably including the often-disastrous soldier-settlement schemes — outside the major cities.

Just as the industrial economy displaced agriculture in the mid twentieth century, it was displaced in turn by the service sector towards the end of the century. By 2000, services represented three-quarters of output and employment. Construction remained strong, but the overall share of employment in “making things” (manufacturing, mining and agriculture) was steadily declining. These transformations changed working life in all sorts of ways, but they didn’t fundamentally challenge the assumptions of capitalism.

A capitalist society’s central driver of growth has always been investment — in buildings, equipment and infrastructure — and investment requires capital. The proceeds from the sale of goods and services, after deducting wages and input costs, must earn a return for the owners of that capital. This is as true for cafes as it is for car factories.

All this changed with the emergence of an information economy. In economic terminology, information is a non-rival good, like Norman Lindsay’s magic pudding. Using information doesn’t reduce the amount that’s available to other people. Information is also cumulative: the more we know, the more we can find out. And information from different sources can be combined to produce new and different information. In economic terminology, the production of information displays economies of scale and scope.

But just as the plot of The Magic Pudding centred on the question of who owned the pudding, control over access to information can be immensely valuable and hard-fought. And there is no necessary relationship between producing information and controlling it.

This changes the nature of investment. Rather than investing in land, building and equipment to produce goods and services, investors focus on securing control of information and profiting from that control. The result is the economic system summed up by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake in the title of their 2017 book, Capitalism without Capital.

Haskel and Westlake described how physical capital has been replaced by “intangible capital,” a concept as hard to grasp as the name implies. Examples of intangible capital include research and development, design, business process re-engineering, market research and branding. Typically, the assets created in this process take the form of intellectual property — patents, copyrights, trademarks and so on — or control over networks and platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Some items classed as intangible capital are relatively straightforward extensions of familiar concepts. The best-known — the research and development expenditure that goes into developing new products — is as much a part of the cost of producing those products as are the labour and machinery used to produce them.

But other forms of intangible investment, such as branding and marketing, are more problematic. As Haskel and Westlake recognise, it is far from obvious that branding enhances the value of the goods and services it promotes: the efforts of one brand to promote itself through advertising largely cancel out the efforts of its competitors. There is some evidence of a net positive effect overall, but it is fairly thin.

Intangible assets differ from tangible assets in the same way information differs from ordinary goods and service. As Haskel and Westlake put it, “Those characteristics are summed up in four S’s, namely that intangible assets, relative to tangible assets, are more likely to be scalable, their costs are more likely to be sunk, and they are inclined to have spillovers and to exhibit synergies with each other.”

The spillovers and synergies mean the benefits of distributing information will often flow to people other than those who produce it. The most obvious examples are Alphabet (owners of Google) and Meta (Facebook), whose most valuable asset is not their computers and buildings but the information to which they provide access. Facebook’s information is supplied in the first instance by its users, but in many cases consists of links to content elsewhere on the internet. Google’s search engine relies entirely on information produced by other people and organisations.

In other words, the connection between investment and profit has broken down. The scalability and sunk costs of intangible assets exacerbate this effect by creating a winner-takes-all model, enabling those with an established position to capture all or most of the benefits of information.

The results are evident in the market value of companies, and particularly the value of the large tech companies that dominate the information economy. Most of the time, we’d expect the value of a firm to reflect the capital invested in it, as captured by Tobin’s Q, a measure of the ratio of market value to capital stock developed by Nobel prize–winning economist James Tobin.

Q ratios were generally near one during the twentieth century. High ratios were seen as a signal that existing capital was yielding a high return and further investments were likely to be profitable; low values suggested lower demand for investment. But this relationship has broken down in spectacular fashion. Alphabet has a market value five times the book value of its assets. The ratio is ten for Amazon, fifteen for Microsoft and twenty-one for Apple. Even Meta, which is clearly in decline, manages a ratio of three. By contrast, General Motors, the classic twentieth-century corporation, rates just under one.

The difference can’t be explained by R&D spending, which is relatively small. The real intangible here is likely to be monopoly power, generated either by intellectual property laws or control over platforms.

The tone of Capitalism without Capital was cautiously optimistic. Haskel and Westlake thought the rise of intangible investment would offset the decline in traditional forms of private investment over the course of the twenty-first century. While acknowledging the growth of inequality and other problems, the pair concluded that “strategies that go with the grain of the long-run rise of intangible investment… are more likely to secure prosperity than those that go against it.”

But in the wake of the pandemic and the (first?) Trump presidency, the problems are clearly much more severe than they seemed — as the subtitle of Haskel and Westlake’s new book, Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy, makes clear. “When we think about the state of the economy today, it is hard not to think, it wasn’t supposed to be like this,” they write. “The world is richer than it has ever been, remarkable technologies are transforming every facet of our lives — and yet, everyone seems to know that, from an economic point of view, something is wrong.”

Many of the things that are wrong can be traced, they say, to problems with intangible capital. Their examples include:

Stagnation: Despite impressive technological progress, economy-wide productivity growth has slowed. Investment in intangibles has declined; so too has economic dynamism, as measured by such variables as the number of new firms. Most notably, the IT sector is now dominated by five firms: Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook/Meta and Google/Alphabet. Using a combination of incumbency and acquisition, the same firms have maintained their dominance even as the sector has been transformed by cloud computing and other web services.

Inequality: Having increased throughout the developed world since the 1980s, inequality has become the subject of steadily increasing concern. It is aggravated by the scalability and synergies of intangible investment, which reward a relatively small number of companies and wage earners.

Dysfunctional competition: Ideally, with many firms in the market, competition offers better products at lower prices. But once markets become sufficiently concentrated, competition tends to take the form of zero-sum efforts to weaken the position of competitors or extract unearned rents. At the extreme are the “patent trolls” who make intellectual property claims over well-known ideas and methods, then extract licence fees from anyone seeking to use this idea.

Inauthenticity: In an intangible economy, it is difficult to distinguish between spurious branding efforts and investments that genuinely enhance the usefulness of products. The result is the general feeling of “fakeness” that accompanies much of modern life.

Fragility: The intangibles economy is vulnerable to both internally generated crises like the global financial crisis and external shocks like Covid-19. In part, this fragility arises because intangible investments are “sunk.” Once an enterprise fails, intangible investments in organisational structure, corporate culture and so on are lost. By contrast, buildings and equipment can be sold when a business is liquidated, saving much of its economic value.

Although Haskel and Westlake frankly acknowledge all these problems, they don’t conclude we should slow the shift to an intangible economy. Rather, they want to change our institutions to complete what they see as an unfinished revolution. To do this, they propose improvements in the financing of research and development and the financing of investment, and offer some worthwhile but tangential suggestions about urban design and school reform.

The standard solution to the problem of financing R&D is for governments to fund “pure” research while private enterprises fund “applied” research, or the development of marketable products. But the characteristics of intangible capital, particularly its spillover effects, mean that producing intangibles is more like pure than applied research.

Haskel and Westlake are sceptical of traditional modes of public research funding. They suggest prizes be used more often to stimulate goal-oriented research (an idea that goes back to the competition that led to the discovery of a method for determining longitude at sea) and subsidies be made to open-source software and data collections. They also endorse the general preference of economists for less stringent patent and copyright protections.

Their analysis of financing focuses on the decline in the neutral real interest rate — that is, the interest rate (adjusted for inflation) at which monetary policy is neither expansionary nor contractionary. Correctly linking the rate’s welcome decline to reduced investment in intangibles, they propose ways of encouraging pension funds and venture capitalists to fill the gap. In a world of very low real interest rates, they also recognise the need to shift away from inflation targeting as the basis of monetary policy.

What’s striking, though perhaps not surprising, is that Haskel and Westlake don’t consider the possibility of an end to capitalism, or even a substantial change in the role of government. To the extent that intangibles are public goods, mainstream economic theory suggests they would best be provided by governments. Private firms can rarely capture the spillover benefits of intangibles without imposing access restrictions that reduce their social value.

Haskel and Westlake discuss traditional spheres of government activity — the defence-related R&D that gave us the internet, for example — but they don’t consider whether governments should become active investors in intangible capital.

The possibilities are full of promise, but also potential pitfalls. Governments could expand the informational role of public media services like the ABC, reversing the cuts of recent decades. They could systematically strive to make information of all kinds available in an easily searchable form, bypassing advertising-driven search engines like Google. And they could provide platforms for social media on a common-carrier basis, requiring easy interconnection and discouraging the use of “algorithms” (a misnomer) to keep people inside a “walled garden.”

It’s easy to point to the problems that would arise if these possibilities were pursued in a world where trust in governments is low. But these are the kinds of arguments that need to be made when the existing economic model is failing so clearly.

Despite the limited scope of the reforms they consider, Haskel and Westlake’s work tackles fundamental questions considered by few other writers. Restarting the Future is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of capitalism, or in the possibility of a post-capitalist future. •

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
By Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake | Princeton University Press | $34.99 | 320 pages

The post Go with the grain appeared first on Inside Story.

You can stop imagining because this is what happened to parents of the twenty children murdered at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012. Infowars host Alex Jones told his audience that the mass shooting had been faked to strengthen the case for tougher gun control laws.

Infowars’s report on the day of the attack was headlined “Connecticut School Massacre Looks Like a False Flag Say Witnesses.” What was going through Jones’s mind, we might wonder, when he declared, “Don’t ever think the globalists that have hijacked this country wouldn’t stage something like this”?

What is remarkable, and is documented so compellingly in Elizabeth Williamson’s book, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, is that these and other flagrantly untrue statements didn’t crush the parents.

One of them, information technology consultant Lenny Pozner, was already a regular listener to Jones’s far-right Infowars program when the shooting occurred. His six-year-old son Noah was among the victims. In January 2013 he heard a segment insinuating that Noah’s mother Veronique had “performed” an interview with Anderson Cooper in CNN’s TV studio while pretending to be in Newtown, Connecticut.

Pozner sent a strongly worded complaint to the program. Responding, an Infowars producer thanked him for sharing his “point of view” and said Jones would like to speak to him. But the producer wanted to know, “How can we confirm that you are the real Lenny Pozner?” Pozner later learned that the split-second glitch in the CNN broadcast that Jones had identified as evidence of fakery had actually been created by the Infowars production team when they converted the interview from its original format to the one used on their own platform.

Pozner was not interested in exposing his family to further hate by appearing on air. But he did begin assembling documents about Noah’s life and posting them on his Google+ page. The flood of negative, carping responses led him to contact the Sandy Hook Hoax Facebook group and subject himself to several hours of online grilling by people demanding he provide evidence for the most minute details of the shooting and accusing him of making money “trolling the internet.”

The group’s site manager drove off anyone who seemed willing to give him a fair hearing. Williamson is struck by the group’s determined defensiveness. “They were a ragtag army of errant thinkers holed up in a Facebook fortress, fending off intrusions of truth.”

Reading about these events is disturbing enough, but the feelings of Noah’s parents and other Sandy Hook families as the campaign against them unfolded are scarcely imaginable. Pozner tells Williamson he felt like a spectator to his own loss, adding: “We thought the internet would give us this accelerated society of science and information, and really, we’ve gone back to flat earth.”

Jones was only one of the early deniers, and he pursued the issue — according to Dan Friesen, who co-hosts a podcast, Knowledge Fight, devoted to critiquing Jones — because of the threat the massacre posed to his pro-gun agenda. “Once there are kids that are dead, Alex can recognise that denial may be a useful tool. On some level he knows that if these events are real, it’s a decent argument for gun control.”

So far, so bad. Williamson goes on to describe an ugly dance between Jones and a coterie of academics pushing conspiracy theories about Sandy Hook, including Maria Hsia Chang, a retired China scholar from the University of Nevada, James Tracy, a journalism professor at Florida Atlantic University, and James Fetzer, a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota.

Chang posted the addresses of the families whose children were killed at Sandy Hook on her blog, Fellowship of the Mind, prompting people to appear at their homes, follow them and look through their rubbish bins searching for proof that the attack was a sham.

Tracy was among the first conspiracy theorists to use the term “crisis actors” — people employed to play the role of grieving families — about Sandy Hook. “Why are select would-be families and students lingering in the area and repeatedly offering themselves for interviews?” asked a January 2013 Infowars article drawing on Tracy’s speculation. “A possible reason is that they are trained actors working under the direction of state and federal authorities and in coordination with cable and broadcast network talent to provide tailor-made crisis acting that realistically drive [sic] home the event’s tragic features.”

Fetzer, for his part, drew on an undefined “research group” to compile a book whose title left no room for doubt about his view: Nobody Died at Sandy Hook: It Was a FEMA Drill to Promote Gun Control. (FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency.)

Despite his dispiriting experience with the Facebook group, Pozner continued his efforts, this time by writing opinion pieces for newspapers pointing out the extent to which he and other Sandy Hook families were being besieged by online hoaxers and by Jones. In 2014 he set up his own online group, HONR, attracting volunteers willing to help him push back against the conspiracy theorists.

The new group began asking the online tech companies to take down blatantly false information, citing specific violations of their terms of service. But they were blanked. Notices about pornography would get the online companies’ attention but little else did, writes Williamson, noting both the irony and the hypocrisy. “The publication of pornography is supported by the First Amendment, enshrined by the courts as a signal test of free-speech principles,” she writes:

But here were the social platforms, scurrying to take down porn while trotting out the First Amendment to explain why they didn’t remove abusive content. Why? Because despite what they say, the platforms are all about pleasing their advertisers, most of whom don’t want their ads adjacent to sexually explicit content.

Pozner and his volunteers then found a stronger lever — copyright laws. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits unauthorised use of copyrighted content on any digital medium, regardless of whether the material is registered with the US Copyright Office. The act doesn’t make internet service providers liable for unwittingly displaying infringing material, but it does require them to remove it once a complaint is received.

To illustrate their posts, the conspiracy theorists would copy images of Noah or other victims of the shootings and then upload them. That’s copyright theft, Pozner thought, and began filing takedown notices, with significant success. When he succeeded in having a picture of Noah removed from an Infowars item in 2015, Jones was apoplectic — admittedly his resting disposition — and spent almost two hours railing against this dire curtailing of his free speech.

Undeterred, Pozner and HONR continued filing notices. When James Fetzer’s book was published they shamed Amazon into removing it from sale. Mainstream media began publicising their efforts and eventually both Fetzer and Tracy were forced to leave their university posts.

In the way of the internet, though, Fetzer released a free PDF of his book that was downloaded at least ten million times. It was like playing Whac-A-Mole with the “conspiratorial–industrial complex,” as Williamson calls it.

Williamson, a journalist with the New York Times, begins her book by reminding readers of what happened on 14 December 2012 when Adam Lanza, a twenty-year-old former student of Sandy Hook who had been showing clear signs of mental disturbance since he was eleven, shot and killed his mother at their home and then drove to the school in Newtown, Connecticut. There, he used three guns to kill twenty children aged six or seven, and six of their teachers, before turning one of the guns on himself.

The details Williamson provides are bleak. Lanza was 183 centimetres tall but weighed only fifty kilos and slipped through the school’s gates and bollards “like a letter through a slot.” The Lanza family gave their home to Newtown after the killings, and the small town’s officials ensured the Lanza house and all its contents were destroyed to prevent anything finding its way onto the murder-memorabilia market.

This was the worst school shooting in American history except for the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, where twenty-seven students and five faculty members were killed before the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, committed suicide. As appalling as that shooting was, even more appalling was the age of the victims at Sandy Hook.

That in itself was a core reason for denying it happened, Williamson discovers when she tries to find what she terms “patient zero” — the origin of the conspiracy theories about the shooting. Although some inflammatory content from the time has been removed from the internet, the remaining records brought a disheartening realisation. “Within hours of the shooting,” she writes, “a mass of people more or less simultaneously decided that the shooting was faked.”

From the distance of a decade, writes Williamson, the shootings at Sandy Hook are clearly “the first mass tragedy to spawn an online circle of people impermeable and hostile to reality and its messengers, whether the mainstream media, law enforcement, or the families of the dead.” Since then, almost every high-profile mass tragedy — including the mass shooting at Uvalde elementary school in Texas earlier this year — has generated similarly disturbing online theories.

Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was among the seventeen injured at Virginia Tech in 2007, tells Williamson the reaction to the Sandy Hook shootings was familiar from her own experience except in one respect. “We didn’t have the disinformation campaigns and the fuel that social media platforms generally give them.”

Facebook had twenty million users globally in 2007; by 2012 the figure exceeded a billion. Around one hundred million YouTube videos were viewed daily on average shortly before the Virginia Tech shooting; by 2012 the “Gangnam Style” video had become the first on YouTube to be viewed more than a billion times. Twitter was barely a year old in 2007, with 5000 tweets sent each day; by the end of 2012 the number was 5000 tweets per second. When a University of Miami political scientist set a up a Google alert for the term “conspiracy theory” in 2011 he received five media articles a day; by 2016 the daily number was between fifty and one hundred.

In 2018, Lenny and Veronique Pozner, seven other Sandy Hook families and an FBI agent targeted by the conspiracists sued Jones for defamation. More or less simultaneously, the biggest social media companies, including Apple, Spotify, Twitter and YouTube, began dropping Jones and Infowars from their platforms. Even the streaming site YouPorn dumped Jones, saying without a trace of irony, “Hate has no place on YouPorn.”

In the four years since then, the defamation cases have been wending their way through the courts. They may seem straightforward: surely claiming parents faked their own children’s deaths for financial gain is about as egregious a statement as you could make? But, as one of the lawyers representing the families pro bono remarks, proving defamation in the United States is harder than proving personal injury.

This is especially so in the case of public figures, who must prove they were defamed with malice or a reckless disregard for the truth. Jones’s lawyers have argued the Sandy Hook parents are public figures because they have lobbied publicly for tighter gun controls. One judge described this as “a very interesting question of law” given the parents were “involuntary” public figures “speaking after their child was murdered in one of the most horrific shootings in American history.”

Alex Jones’s circumstances had meanwhile undergone a curious change that paradoxically rendered him more vulnerable, even as his notoriety has soared. His relentless fanning of conspiracy theories had turbocharged the popularity of Infowars, as had his bromance with Donald Trump, doubling traffic to his site to fifty million views a month and boosting viewings of its YouTube videos to in excess of a billion. In 2013 Jones’s business was already bringing in US$20 million in revenue yearly.

“Jones got away with saying all this stuff before because he didn’t have an audience,” says Kyle Farrer, a lawyer representing Pozner. “Who cares what some guy yelling at clouds is saying? But now his megaphone is significantly bigger. He’s talking to this big audience and now he’s saying this crazy stuff that has a real effect on people. It’s like his rise is his downfall.”

For Farrer’s fellow lawyer on the case, Mark Bankston, the only threat Jones takes seriously is one that threatens his business. “If you make him understand that these kinds of ‘journalistic’ practices have a cost and an effect, and that he won’t be able to profit off of causing pain to a family, I think that’s a victory too.” Particularly if that message is heard by his acolytes and imitators.

Jones’s growing problem was that no matter how ridiculous we might find his unhinged ranting or his non-stop promotion and selling of products with names like Prosta Guard, Real Red Pill, Superblue Fluoride-free Toothpaste and Combat One Tactical Bath Wipes (“Baby wipes for middle-aged men who serve in a thrown-together militia out in the woods”), he was slowly, ineluctably being drawn into courtrooms where he had to abide by others’ rules.

This was unforgettably illustrated in one of the lawsuits playing out since Williamson’s book went to press. As a clip from the Law and Crime Network shows, Judge Maya Guerra Gamble found that she needed to talk to Jones as if he were a disobedient third-grader.

Judge: You must tell the truth. This is not your show. You’re already under oath. You’ve already violated that oath twice today. It seems absurd to instruct you to tell the truth again while you testify but here I am. You must tell the truth while you testify. This [pointing to the witness box] is not your show… Do you understand what I have said to you?

Jones: Yes, I believe what I said is true.

Judge (cutting him off): You believe everything you say is true. But it isn’t. Your beliefs do not make something true.

In the end, the answer to the question of what went through Jones’s mind as he began spouting his bile against the relatives of the Sandy Hook victims in 2012 is: who cares? The reason why he is “angry, mendacious and heedless of the wreckage he creates,” as his former wife, Kelly Nichols attests, is less important than the fact he is at long last being held to account for his words.

So far he has lost every one of the defamation cases launched against him, not least because he has refused to cooperate in the standard legal process of discovery and given judges little choice but to rule against him. Now that he has filed for bankruptcy the key question is: will he be able to sequester his wealth from awards for damages or will his business be ruined?

That he is in this predicament rather than continuing to rant with a voice that sounds, as Williamson puts it, like “twenty miles of rough road” is because of the determination of the Sandy Hook parents, along with all those who lent their expertise to the task. Asking what has been going through their minds, not just on 14 December 2012 but in the ten years since then, is the more pertinent question. It is also a much harder one to answer, particularly if you really do stop to imagine walking a mile in their shoes. •

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
By Elizabeth Williamson | Penguin Random House | $49.99 | 482 pages

The post Bearing the unbearable appeared first on Inside Story.

On the internet, where most of what passes for public debate now takes place, the political temperature is permanently set to one hundred. Bad faith is the order of the day. The twenty-first-century public square is a suffocating, hyperpartisan, dopamine-fuelled dungheap of memes and nasty tweets. Every demographic group claims victimhood. Every issue provokes hysterical disagreement. Everyone is angry about everything all of the time.

For Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens, the authors of the new Quarterly Essay Uncivil Wars: How Contempt Is Corroding Democracy, both sides of politics share responsibility for this discursive rot. “Something’s amiss,” they suggest at the outset. Transgender activists and their gender-critical opponents are engaged in a battle to the death. Black Americans who speak of white supremacy deploy the same language of existential erasure as the increasing numbers of white Americans who invoke the spectre of anti-white discrimination. Families, apparently, are being torn apart by political polarisation.

What unites the loudest voices on both left and right, they argue, is an attitude of sneering contemptuousness for their political opponents. Both sides live in sealed-off, alternative realities: the left, beholden to a culture of prim censoriousness and moral absolutism, resides in some kind of imaginary university campus, prosecuting thought crimes and jumping at shadows; the right, meanwhile, occupies a Fox News–induced fantasy universe of fear and resentment, eternally besieged by the traitorous and freedom-hating metropolitan elites.

For Aly and Stephens, this contemptuous approach — or rather, non-approach — to public deliberation is both dangerous and new. It is, they think, substantively different from the kind of constructive disagreement that is meant to provide democratic politics with its flexibility, dynamism and responsiveness. To view someone with contempt, they argue, is to see them as an illegitimate political actor, to judge their ideas and interests as beneath consideration. The contemned’s place in the polity is questionable, their right to participate in a deliberative, mutually respectful debate refused. They are irredeemable, unworthy, deplorable.

Aly and Stephens’s story of how and why this happened is a familiar one. In recent years, they write, the perverse algorithmic incentives of the major social media platforms have encouraged a race to the bottom: the more base and prejudicial a news item or post, the more clicks, the more advertisers, the more dollars. For the authors, this “commodification of emotion” has soured the very “air” in which political debate takes place. It has closed off the possibilities for political cooperation and participation in a shared democratic project. Unless more attention is paid to “the conditions of our common life,” they warn, democracy as we know it may cease to exist.

This posture of high moral seriousness will be familiar to regular listeners of The Minefield, Aly and Stephens’s long-running discussion program on ABC Radio National. For the past seven years they have been taking prominent weekly news items and using them as prompts for stimulating and somewhat highfalutin discussions of “the ethical and moral dilemmas of modern life.” This year alone they have picked apart topics as diverse as hunger, ambivalence, housing affordability, the Ukraine conflict, the Religious Discrimination Bill and the television series Succession.

As a duo, they have an entertaining dynamic. Both are preternaturally articulate and argumentative. Stephens, who moonlights as the editor of the ABC’s Religion and Ethics section, is loquacious and widely read in political and moral philosophy. Aly, a media polymath with a high-profile side gig on Channel Ten’s The Project, has a more lawyerly manner, and is naturally inclined to take a sceptical or contrarian view. At times it seems as if he stands by with a sewing needle, waiting to deflate each new hot air balloon sent up by his excitable co-host.

By passing regular moral judgement on matters of public concern, both fit the definition of what we used to call public intellectuals. Both are consummate media performers, ready to offer their thoughts on almost any topic. Like all good public intellectuals, too, they tend to divide opinion. For some, their posture of good-natured intellectual detachment is refreshing, floating loftily above the catfights and mudslinging of the daily news cycle. For others, though, it all comes across as impossibly smug, a nationally syndicated graduate seminar run by two self-indulgent know-alls.

Either way, the impeccably courteous atmosphere of The Minefield provides a working model for the kind of respectful deliberation both would prefer to see in broader public discussion. Both delight in doubt and uncertainty, in moral ambiguities and ethical grey areas. As they often cheerfully admit, they are prone to finish each show even more confused than when they began. In this respect, Albert Camus’s epigraph to their Quarterly Essay reads almost like a motto: “We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right.”

In Uncivil Wars, Aly and Stephens take the Minefield formula and pursue it at essay length. The central problem they seek to pick apart — incivility in public debate — is presented as a matter of existential urgency. Their overall diagnosis — an excess of contempt — is defined in highly abstract terms. The arguments they provide are self-consciously polemical, their philosophising a provocation, their generalisations an invitation to further debate. And their discussion of how it all plays out is shot through with grand moral language: vengeance, shame, envy, anger, resentment, justice and forgiveness.

Despite Aly and Stephens’s posture of detachment, though, it is the left that seems to receive the brunt of their censure. The key illustrative examples they use to frame the essay are not the more overt Schmittian “friend and enemy” politics of the new populist right, but rather Hillary Clinton’s infamous characterisation of Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and, closer to home, the Stop Adani anti-coal convoy that toured regional towns in the weeks leading up the 2019 federal election.

In the standard narrative that has formed around these two events, both have come to be seen as mistakes or turning points for the left, moments when establishment liberal elites inadvertently revealed their contempt for the forgotten people they were ostensibly trying to persuade. The result, per this interpretation, was that working people were driven to vote for right-wing politicians in protest. If only Clinton had not been so rude to Trump voters, they might yet have been persuaded not to vote for him; if only the Stop Adani protesters had invited the coalminers into their homes for tea and coffee, Labor might not have lost in Queensland.

This, to me, seems a rather naive reading of these events. Without a radical change in Labor’s policy, it is unlikely that much could have been said to people in rural Queensland to prevent them from voting in what they perceived to be their own interests. Clinton’s “deplorables” comment might have backfired as a political strategy, but it was nevertheless a pretty clear statement of her own political beliefs and those of her core constituency: the much-maligned urban white-collar professional managerial class.

Democratic politics is not always about consensus. It is also a way of working out the issues on which we disagree. That the interests of metropolitan voters did not align with those who were drawn to Trump is largely the point.

In a general sense, Aly and Stephens are right: something really is amiss. Since 2016, or perhaps 2008, many of the world’s major liberal democracies have looked much less robust than they once did. The number of simultaneous crises to be navigated is so overwhelming — climate change, geopolitical tensions, deglobalisation, war in Europe, inflation, pandemic, obscene wealth inequality and the resurgence of class politics — that some have taken to calling it a “polycrisis.” In this environment, established political parties and media institutions have faced continuing tests of their legitimacy. By any measure, these are genuinely concerning times.

The argument of Uncivil Wars, though, is that contempt and incivility are not merely symptoms of these concurrent crises: they are the cause. The teetering liberal democracies of the West will not survive the mounting threats to their existence, Aly and Stephens suggest, unless everyone can agree to put down their weapons and show a little kindness and respect. In the abstract, it is hard to disagree with such an argument: no popular, broad-based political movement was ever built without some element of mutual consideration, constructiveness and cooperation.

But we should not pretend that because public discourse has a contemptuous tone, a kind of equivalence exists between the political agendas of left and right, or between the quality of the solutions each proposes for the resolution of our social ills. For all the posturing and moral policing of the most annoying sections of the online liberal left, and for all the blind spots and unconscious biases of the “mainstream media,” there is still no liberal equivalent of Fox News, an organisation so flagrantly hostile to democratic norms that it is actively undermining the functioning of the American republic.

Aly and Stephens do not have any particular sympathy with the reactionary right wing of American politics. But when they suggest that the fascist inclinations and genuine illiberalism of the new American right has its mirror on the left, in the form of cancel culture and political correctness, they echo one of its most ridiculous talking points. Being mean to each other on the internet is not the same as denying someone’s political rights. As the authors’ own historical examples attest, hostile argument, straw manning of your opponents, exaggeration, partisanship — even incivility — have been features of democratic politics for much of modernity, regardless of the media environment.

Indeed, as Aly and Stephens concede, there are also circumstances where contempt is in fact justifiable and even politically productive, especially when it is directed “upward” towards those who wield power. In such circumstances, they write, appeals for civility in public debate — appeals for less contempt — function mostly as a means of stifling dissent. Contempt for a common enemy might instead be thought of as a way of building a political coalition. If the ends justify the means, it could even be considered a political virtue.

Aly and Stephens are correct to observe that the political “air quality” has become increasingly toxic, and that this sometimes undermines our ability to seek common ground. Stopping the rot in our democracies, though, requires more than simple policing of the way we talk to each other. If we have any hope of building political coalitions capable of seriously addressing the polycrisis, we will need to find more accurate and persuasive ways to make sense of the mess we are in.

Of course we shouldn’t pretend our answers to these questions are always absolutely right. But we shouldn’t be afraid to say when the other side is absolutely wrong. And if this means showing some “upward contempt” towards those whom our malfunctioning political system currently benefits, so be it. By pointing the finger at both sides, Uncivil Wars provides no real case for what should be changed and how we should change it. In the end, it comes across as mere moralising. •

The post Flame wars appeared first on Inside Story.

But if they are eager to defend the patriarchy, they are even more devoted to the Fatherland. They act as online vigilantes on the lookout for anyone — Chinese, foreign, or foreign Chinese — who has “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.”

The feelings of the Chinese people can be hurt in many ways, according to the most vocal and thin-skinned of their self-appointed representatives: call out human rights abuses in Xinjiang, support Hong Kong democrats or Taiwan autonomy, criticise Xi Jinping or ask #WhereIsPengShuai, to name some of the most obvious. Little Pinks keep a beady eye on artists and entertainers, trawling for current offences and past missteps, ready to foul the reputation and break the careers of any they’ve deemed to have crossed the Red line. Among those who have felt their wrath are Chloé Zhao, Oscar-winning director of Nomadland, for something she said (the mainland is a place of “lies”) and something she didn’t (“The US is now my country” — she actually said “not my country”). Another was a Chinese model living overseas who wished her followers “happy lunar new year” instead of “happy Chinese new year.”

The Little Pinks demand apologies, and frequently receive the most grovelling of ones, from those who want to keep working, or at least making money, in China. For one of the most bizarrely entertaining, see that of Fast and Furious star John Cena, apologising for calling Taiwan a country in mildly fluent if syntactically eccentric Mandarin, painfully wrestling each syllable to the floor as he professes his love for the Chinese people.

Little Pinks and apology videos were ripe for satire. The Malaysian-Chinese hip-hop artist and filmmaker Namewee and Kimberley Chen, an Australian singer living in Taiwan, have now delivered it in spades with their parodical music video “Fragile,” or “It Might Break Your Pinky Heart.” In the process they have, if not broken, at least cracked the internet.

The video begins with a tongue-in-cheek trigger warning for Little Pinks, opening in a Hobbiton-like rural idyl. A panda, dressed in pink camo overalls and matching military hat, wakes up and does his morning calisthenics while waving a banner that says NMSL (ni ma si le, “your mother’s dead,” one of the Little Pinks’ favourite terms of abuse). We see pinkish bales of cotton (symbolising Xinjiang) and garlic chives (internet slang for the cynical government and corporate view of people in China as a harvestable and replaceable resource: cut them down, and more grow back). As the duo sing lines such as “You never listen to what I have to say… you treat the world as your enemy… you say (I belong to you)… and want me to protect your fragile glass heart…” the panda frolics, plays wine glasses, breaks wine glasses, chops garlic chives and cooks up a pink bat stew. When the doe-eyed and hammily rueful Chen croons, “I’m so sorry” for hurting his feelings, she’s clearly anything but.

The song and video are a rich Where’s Wally of symbols, verbal puns, political barbs and piss-takes. Its frothy pink surface and sweet, energetic vocals are suffused with references to the forced closure of Hong Kong’s lively anti-Communist paper Apple Daily, re-education and forced labour in Xinjiang, the production of counterfeit goods, Covid-19’s origins, territorial claims in the South China Sea and Taiwanese autonomy. There’s even an allusion to Xi Jinping’s boast about humping one hundred kilos of wheat on a carrying pole for five kilometres during the Cultural Revolution without switching shoulders.

Namewee released the video on his YouTube channel on 15 October; by the end of November, it had more than thirty-four million views, hundreds of thousands of comments and almost one million “likes.”

“Fragile” has given a boost to what we might call “Pinkology,” with apologies to all the Redologists out there. Redology, hongxue, doesn’t refer to the study of communism or “Red China,” but is the field of academic study devoted to commentary and exegesis on the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber. But there is a link: like many other of China’s ancient literary classics, poems and songs, Dream is full of cryptic political and other references.

Chinese literary culture, with its accretion of thousands of years of references, intertextual quotations and riffs, has long provided satirists with what the scholar Geremie R. Barmé described to me as “a haystack of allusions in which to hide your needles.” Barmé and the linguist Stuart Jay Raj are among those who have contributed to Pinkology by decoding and contextualising the multilayered satire of “Pinky Heart” for an English-speaking audience.

Although Communists aren’t generally renowned for their sense of humour, Mao Zedong openly admired one of the greatest and most acerbic of modern China’s literary satirists, Lu Xun (1881–1936). Had Lu Xun, with his mordant wit and commitment to social justice, lived to see the founding of the People’s Republic, however, it’s not at all certain that he’d have survived communism itself. Despite official insistence that Lu Xun’s barbed criticisms of the Chinese character apply only to the “old society,” his work stubbornly continues to offer insights into today’s China. In fact, his most famous creation, the character Ah Q, thin-skinned, obsequious towards his superiors and a bully to those he considers his inferiors — a man who insists every slap in the face is a victory — might even be seen as the Great Ancestor of the Little Pinks.

Yu Liang, an influential journalist and academic at Shanghai’s Fudan University, has written a seminal work of Pinkology: “The Genealogy and Ecology of the Little Pinks, and the Future of Chinese Youth.” He traces their origins, and that of their style of action, to China’s overheated online fan club culture, in which fans typically mob-attack anyone criticising their beloved idol, band or team — in this case, Team China or Team CPC. Too young to know about the Cultural Revolution, or the early years of reform, never mind much of real life itself, Yu observes, “They were born on the Internet and will die on the Internet.” Yu, himself a proponent of China’s new nationalism, derides the Little Pinks’ ideology as “video-clip Marxism.” Their patriotism is entitled, middle-class and consumerist (their calls to action typically take the shape of consumer boycotts) and conforms, he notes, to a “welfare” rather than a “class” narrative.

Another person who has studied the Little Pinks is Fang Kecheng of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Despite their hardcore support for communism, he says, their biases mirror those of the Western alt-right: anti-feminist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist and ethnically (Han) chauvinistic. Some even voice support for far-right and neo-Nazi figures. They also share the right’s contempt for the liberal, progressive left: their favourite insult of baizuo translates perfectly as “libtard.” Yet their behaviour parallels the hyper-policing of identity politics and “cancel culture” of their left-wing peers in the West. Yu Liang wonders too “if Little Pinks share the fragile psyche of American youth.”

In response to “Fragile,” Chinese official media, on cue and without any sense of irony, have accused Namewee and Kimberley Chen of hurting the feelings of the Chinese people. The authorities have shut down the pair’s Weibo accounts and scrubbed their names and work from the Chinese internet. Namewee, implacable and seemingly delighted, told the BBC that the ban completed the artwork. As Chen sings in an ironic apology video, posted two days after the original went up:

Sorry to have hurt you. Weibo deleted me — whatever.
I can hear a sound — it’s hearts of glass shattering.
It’s okay, I still have IG and FB.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so direct, so super-direct.
I’m so sorry
YouTube trending at number 1. •

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Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of the software house Atlassian, paid a record $100 million for Fairwater in 2018, and moved in with his young family. Atlassian’s other founder, Scott Farquhar, had already bought the neighbouring house, “Elaine,” which had been owned by Sir Warwick’s cousin and John Fairfax Ltd director Sir Vincent Fairfax, for $71 million.

Where Sir Warwick went to work chauffeur-driven in finely tailored Prince of Wales check suits, in later years favouring mutton-chop sideburns, forty-one-year-old Cannon-Brookes wears jeans, sweatshirts and a peaked canvas cap, has a straggly beard and shoulder-length hair, and takes public transport to work.

The old Fairfax building on Broadway featured different tiers of catering, ranging from an executive dining room for senior managers, editors and directors down to two greasy-spoon canteens, one for white-collar staff and the other for the inky printers. A reserved elevator took Sir Warwick and other directors to the wood-panelled top floor. Otherwise the building was so bleakly utilitarian it was once used as a location for a movie set in Stalin-era Moscow.

Some 300 metres away, Atlassian’s new $546 million headquarters, recently approved by the NSW government as part of the remake of Central railway station, will be a forty-storey concrete, steel and timber structure running on 100 per cent renewable energy. It will feature indoor and outdoor garden terraces where executives and programmers will mingle under a corporate philosophy that declares “no bulls—t” as one of its guiding principles.

The Atlassian story, now a legend, has inspired a generation of internet startups. It began when Cannon-Brookes, a banker’s son who went to the expensive Cranbrook school, not far from where he lives now, and Farquhar, a working-class boy from Sydney’s outer suburbs who won a place at the selective James Ruse high school, met during information technology and science classes at the University of NSW.

On graduating in 2002, they formed Atlassian and began work on a new program called Jira, designed to improve collaborative software development projects and sort out program bugs. They financed the startup with $10,000 drawn on maxed-out credit cards. Jira and other products designed to enhance creative cooperation found ready markets. Two decades later, Microsoft, Oracle and the other top-ten software makers use Atlassian products, as do major global companies including Shell, Toyota, Amazon and Nokia Verizon, and universities including Harvard, Stanford, Yale and MIT.

In 2010 the partners raised US$60 million from a big US venture capital fund, and in 2015 they floated Atlassian on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York. It now has a market capitalisation of US$108 billion, making it the 143rd-biggest corporation in the world by that measure, with 6000 employees in Australia, the United States, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Japan and India. Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar both own 22.7 per cent, making each of them worth US$24.5 billion.

The two partners haven’t just spent big on the finer things in life. They have also been lobbing boulders into the stagnant ponds of Australia’s economy and politics. Belatedly, a decade or so after the United States, tech billionaires are disrupting Australian business, and their firepower is immense.

One of the first inklings came in early 2017 when South Australia suffered a statewide blackout after tens of thousands of lightning strikes and two tornadoes cut power lines. Conservative politicians and journalists pounced, blaming the then Labor state government for relying too much on wind and solar power rather than “stable” coal or gas generators.

Cannon-Brookes picked up on a claim by Tesla’s vice-president for energy products, Lyndon Rive, that his company’s big lithium batteries could fix the state’s energy network in one hundred days. On Twitter, he asked Tesla founder Elon Musk how serious he was. “If I can make the $ happen (& politics),” he asked, “can you guarantee the 100 MW in 100 days?”

“Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free,” Musk tweeted back. “That serious enough for you?”

Musk was derided by then federal treasurer Scott Morrison, who around the same time brandished a lump of coal in parliament to taunt Labor and the Greens. “By all means have the world’s biggest battery, have the world’s biggest banana, have the world’s biggest prawn like we have on the roadside around the country,” said the man destined to be prime minister. “But that is not solving the problem.”

The big battery began operating in November that year, some sixty days after an agreement had been signed between Tesla, French renewable firm Neoen, and the SA government. As a backup, it can power 30,000 homes for eight hours, or 60,000 homes for four. As a source of cheap power, it’s estimated to save South Australian consumers about $40 million a year.

The battery’s capacity is currently being doubled, and state governments and power companies around Australia are following its example.

“The way capital has moved much more strongly towards renewables than the Coalition has is fascinating,” says former Australian National University professor of economics Andrew Leigh, now a federal Labor MP. “You can see the tension within the Business Council of Australia and how increasingly renewables are being seen as the sensible way to go.”

Leigh believes that Mike Cannon-Brookes stands out so much because the Australian business landscape has been so static. Aside from pharmaceutical major CSL, he says, the five largest firms on the stock market are the same as they were thirty-five years ago. “You see much more dynamism and flux in the US. The US has completely turned over its top five companies in the last thirty-five years, and the dominance of tech in the share market has been well-established for a decade.”

Business is coming round on climate, though. Leigh reports having very different conversations with business leaders from those he has with his counterparts on the other side of parliament. Coalition MPs, he says, “are caught up in talking about 2050 targets when the conversation in Glasgow is going to be about 2030. They’re still running scare campaigns about electric vehicles ending the weekend. You get a sense when you are talking to businesspeople that they’re excited about what Tesla and others are doing, they’re looking at renewables, they’re aware they have to account to the market on climate emissions. It’s just a very different conversation.”

“It’s a great thing for Australia that Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar have made an absolute fortune,” says Ralph Evans, a former head of the federal government’s Austrade. “There have been venture capital successes before, but much smaller. This is a very big one and it shows it can be done. It will encourage many others.”

Evans cites other examples of emerging firms, notably the Sydney-based graphic design platform Canva, started by Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams in Perth eight years ago, which now has 1500 staff and 750,000 customers worldwide, and is valued at US$40 billion.

For Evans, the Atlassian partners reflect the spirit of the San Francisco Bay area. “It’s full of people like Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar,” he says. “They are not going to put up with what they’re told to think by Murdoch or Donald Trump or anybody else like that.”

As well as taking a high-profile position on climate, the company weighs into debates on immigration, arguing for more open transfers of expertise, and IT security, questioning the push by intelligence agencies to compel communications and social media companies to give them “backdoor” access to encrypted data.

But green technology is the subject that has brought Cannon-Brookes out into advocacy — and action. Over the past week, as Morrison dragged his Coalition partners into reluctant agreement on a net zero target for 2050 while sticking with the Abbott government’s target of 28 per cent reduction by 2030, Cannon-Brookes has been spurring action outside the federal government.

He and his wife Annie pledged to invest $1 billion in green technology projects and donate a further $500 million to organisations working on the climate crisis, and promised that Atlassian itself would be a net zero operation by 2040. He says the 2050 target cited by Morrison as a historic moment was already a “done deal” for most of the advanced economies, with ambitious 2030 targets now far more important.

His latest commitments come on top of some $1 billion that Cannon-Brookes has put into green energy ventures. One is a company called Sun Cable, with offices in Singapore, Darwin and Sydney, started by partners David Griffin, Mac Thompson and Fraser Thompson. It was seed-funded by Cannon-Brookes’s private investment firm, Grok Ventures, alongside iron ore magnate Andrew Forrest’s Squadron Energy and others.

On 20 October, as the Nationals caucus was still chewing the grass stalks on net zero, Sun Cable announced that a raft of important global firms, including engineering giants Bechtel, Hatch and SMEC, were joining its $30 billion project to take solar power from northern Australia to Singapore.

The project involves some 125 square kilometres of solar arrays in the Simpson Desert, connected to Darwin by an 800 kilometre cable, and then undersea to Singapore by a 4200 kilometre high-voltage direct current cable. The project is designed to supply 15 per cent of the island republic’s electricity and cut emissions by enough for it to reach its 2030 abatement target. Construction is planned to start in 2023, with completion in 2028, when it is expected to generate about $2 billion a year in earnings for Australia.

It’s a big test of the cable transmission technology. The most ambitious example so far is an 800 kilometre high-voltage direct current cable between Norway and Britain, with shorter ones from offshore windfarms to European centres. But a solar-cable project over a similarly ambitious distance is proposed to link solar arrays in Morocco with Britain.

Iain MacGill, a UNSW associate professor of electrical engineering who has collaborated with Sun Cable, says the project is “technically leading edge” in its combination of terminal configuration, distance, power transfer capacity, and water depth. “There are other HVDC links that collectively do most of these things (except that distance), but not all together,” he says.

“The commercial challenges and risks are likely the most important in terms of the project being implemented,” MacGill goes on. “However, the commercial opportunity is also extremely attractive given Singapore’s current reliance on gas generation, limited local renewable energy options, and plans to increase their use of renewables and reduce emissions.”

Another big renewables scheme, the solar-and-wind Asian Renewable Energy Hub proposed for northwest Australia, has switched from HVDC energy exports to green hydrogen and now green ammonia. Ralph Evans notes that Singapore is already building floating solar arrays in its own backwaters, and could find larger floating arrays in nearby Indonesian waters a cheaper proposition than the distant Australian source.

Somewhat ironically, Scott Morrison has found himself part of the marketing for Sun Cable, pushing its merits to his Singapore counterpart Lee Hsien Loong on a stopover to the G7 summit earlier  this year. Australia’s ambassador in Jakarta, Penny Williams, also worked to gain the Indonesian government’s approval for the undersea cabling, announced last month, with the project pledging $2 billion in technology transfers to Indonesian institutions.

After these latest announcements, Cannon-Brookes said Sun Cable could be just the start of renewable energy exports, and Australia should be thinking of a “500 per cent” renewables target.

“Every step forward puts the naysayers further in the rear-view mirror,” he tweeted. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Atlassian shrugged appeared first on Inside Story.

Sims says Google has done more deals than Facebook. “Google has reached deals with the Conversation, SBS and other organisations that Facebook has not done deals with. Google is still negotiating and finalising deals with more news media companies and seems to be approaching this exercise in the right spirit. We are concerned that Facebook does not currently seem to take the same approach.”

Facebook’s dealings with the smaller independents will form part of a review of the code due to start in March next year, says Sims. The review “can examine closely the performance of all parties and whether the government’s expectations have been met.”

The campaign by the independents will highlight the murky mix of money, politics and strong-arm tactics that characterised the news media bargaining code’s first year of operation. The code, which came into force in March this year, is world-first legislation under competition law to force Google and Facebook to reach agreements with news media companies for featuring their content. It aims to protect the viability of public interest journalism and redress an imbalance in market power between the digital platforms and media companies.

At the last moment — and after Facebook made its displeasure clear by blocking Australians’ access to news content on its platform — the government changed the legislation. The tech giants would now be given a chance to strike their own deals with accredited news media organisations before the treasurer Josh Frydenberg considered compelling them to do so using the act’s “designation” provision. The treasurer also indicated that he was unlikely to use that power because Google and Facebook were already striking deals with media companies. That left the legislation technically inactive, with the threat of designation — a “nuclear option,” in the words of one government insider — acting as a big stick.

When the legislation passed, communications minister Paul Fletcher said that he expected deals to be struck with small publishers as well as large ones, but concern has persisted that the smaller players, who lack political as well as commercial power, will miss out.

Australian Property Journal editor Nelson Yap is one of the organisers of the new independent publishers’ campaign. He says that some small publishers have had their emails and phone calls ignored by Google and Facebook, and others have had their requests to negotiate rejected without reason. He believes that Google and Facebook are “doing just enough deals,” mostly with larger and politically influential publishers, to “take the issue off the front pages.”

The university-backed outlet the Conversation has petitioned parliament after successfully striking a deal with Google but being rejected by Facebook. “Without providing a reason,” editor and executive director Misha Ketchell wrote recently, “Facebook declined to negotiate with the Conversation and SBS, and many other quality media companies eligible under the Code.”

The growing coalition of small and independent publishers plans to seek ACCC permission to collectively bargain with Google and Facebook. They also plan to petition for both platforms to be designated. Designation would force them not only to bargain in good faith with any registered news media businesses wanting to negotiate, but also to share information about how content is carried on their platforms and give notice of changes to algorithms that determine how content is distributed.

The members of the emerging coalition have shared experience of getting the brush-off from Facebook, says Yap, often with communications being completely ignored. Google has cut some deals but rejected or failed to respond to other requests to negotiate.

Yap says he had early communications with Google — “They basically acknowledged my existence” — but since then he has heard nothing. Facebook’s response to approaches has been to urge him — and at least five other small publishers I’ve contacted — to drop any attempt to bargain and instead apply for a grant through the Facebook-funded Australian News Fund, which is administered by the prestigious Walkley Foundation.

But the independent publishers were dismayed to discover that one of the conditions of applying for the grant is that they “not have a content licensing agreement in place with Facebook.” They have understandably read that as meaning that by taking a grant they effectively end any chance of cutting a deal, at least for the life of the grant.

Facebook says that a publisher could receive a grant, and later cut a deal. It just couldn’t cut a deal before applying for a grant.

Yap criticises the Walkley Foundation for lending its name to such a scheme and says that in any case the chance to apply for a grant is no substitute for a commercial deal. “It’s a competitive grant scheme, so there is no guarantee you will get it.”

The chief executive of the Walkley Foundation, Louisa Graham, says that the foundation was not “privy to Facebook’s commercial negotiations” and agreed to manage the grants program “because it represents a substantive investment into the Australian media industry at a time when smaller, regional and public interest–focused news organisations and journalists are facing increasing financial strain.”

Applications, which opened this month, would be independently assessed in a competitive process, she says, and “the response has been enthusiastic.”

The publishers in the emerging coalition include Alt Media, which publishes the Sydney community newspaper City Hub and the LGBTI-focused Star Observer, Croakey Health Media, Naracoorte News, National Indigenous Times, Probono Australia, Hills to Hawkesbury Community News, Western Sydney Publishing Group, QNews, the Tasmanian Inquirer, Renew Economy, the Clarence Valley Independent and (full disclosure) Inside Story. Other publications, including several from the ethnic press, are considering joining.

Google said in a statement that it had reached agreements with more than one hundred Australian publishers, and provided me with boosterish endorsements from Independent Australia, Women’s Agenda, Australian Associated Press and SBS. Independent Australia — a trenchantly left-wing outlet — described Google as “an absolute pleasure to deal with.”

Facebook’s head of news partnerships for Australia and New Zealand, Andrew Hunter, says he strongly rejected any suggestion the company doesn’t “support or work with” smaller independent publishers. As well as “commercial arrangements with a diverse range of publishers,” Facebook provides grants and funded programs — including the Accelerator program, which funds innovation — directly aimed at small and regional publishers.

A recent deal with the 170-member Country Press Association was aimed at “the digital transformation of regional newsrooms.” Through the combination of these investments, says Hunter, “Facebook is supporting the newsrooms producing the vast majority of civic and public interest journalism across the nation.”

More broadly, Rod Sims says that the news media bargaining code has been “extremely successful,” leading to a “huge number of commercial deals with a wide range of media companies.”

There’s no doubt that is true. While nothing in the code ensures that money flowing from the digital platforms is spent on journalism rather than boosting profit, at least some of the money is clearly being used to hire journalists. The Guardian Australia, for example, has greatly expanded its staff in recent months, with more jobs advertised. Other big publishers have also been hiring, thanks to the flow of new money.

But others have criticised the code as a bad precedent — effectively bullying Google and Facebook into paying up, rather than reflecting any real calculation of commercial value. Media analyst Hal Crawford wrote recently in PressGazette that “by ‘playing dirty’ to squeeze out some income in the short term, the Australian government and media industry has stored up trouble in the long term.”

The deals done under the code are confidential, making it impossible to understand how news content is being valued. In Crawford’s words, “this is a game without rules being played out of sight.” A PressGazette investigation found that Australian publishers are getting a better deal from Google than overseas media are, almost certainly because of political pressure rather than a robust calculation of commercial value.

While they dance around saying it outright, Facebook’s argument is basically that it believes grants and other funded programs are a better way of supporting smaller players than commercial deals.

A commercial deal has obligations on both sides: performance benchmarks that a News Corp or a Nine Media might be able to fulfil, but an Independent Australia or an Inside Story might not. Such deals are said to be very complex, informed by metrics on reach, engagement and whether there is premium or paywalled content not otherwise available on Facebook. So Facebook prefers to make grants and fund programs for smaller players.

We might favourably interpret this as Facebook being an enlightened corporate citizen. Or, more cynically, we might see it as enlightened public relations. After all, surely it is possible to cut a simple, viable commercial deal if you really want to.

If Facebook gives a grant or funds a program, the power remains in Facebook’s hands. It is corporate charity. Whereas the idea of a bargain is that it is made between dignified equals — the whole rationale of the news media bargaining code being to even the playing field.

But it is all very complicated. Given the lack of data on how the market is valuing content on digital platforms, it is likely that if the campaign by the independents succeeds it will be more about politics than because of a robust commercial calculation.

The Conversation gives away its content for free to lift the profile of academic research. How, then, can it claim recompense from Google and Facebook, but not from the ABC or the Age or the other outlets that republish its articles?

Other members of the new independent coalition don’t always pay their contributors. How can they then seek to put a commercial value on its use by Google and Facebook? (At the very least, any flow of funds should go straight to the writers.)

Keep in mind that next March’s review of the news media bargaining code is likely to coincide with the federal election, and Facebook has the power to block Australians’ access to news content, as it did earlier this year. That would be a disaster. Or then again, in the light of recent revelations about Facebook’s conduct, perhaps a blessing.

Nobody thinks the current treasurer will take the “nuclear option” and designate the digital platforms with an election looming, and that raises the question of whether the publishers who do have deals with Google and Facebook will be able to cut good deals when the current ones expire. The answer may well depend on the treasurer of the day, and whether he or she has the stomach for a fight. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Cracking the code appeared first on Inside Story.

It was frightening and depressing. Some reporters were even attacked in the street. Hidden by the violent actions and rhetoric, though, was another, less explicit message. What the protesters wanted most was basic, accurate information — including about themselves — even as they were attacking those most likely to provide it.

At the order of the police, the livestream from the news media helicopter was cut. (The ban was later overturned by the courts.) The protesters had been using it to find each other, and without it they were lost. Appeals went out on Telegram for people in tall buildings to post shots of the street to help guide them.

Confusion grew about where to meet, and where the police were. Social media channels were filled with conflicting messages and instructions. Almost certainly the groups were being disrupted by misinformation from outsiders, and perhaps also from undercover police.

After the first frightening two days, dwindling groups of protesters roamed the city, sometimes literally in circles, trying to find their fellows and amass sufficient numbers to mount a meaningful protest. In this chaotic and leaderless display of civic unrest, social media could only get them so far.

The lesson? To take effective political action you need a lot of things, not least information you can trust. But that’s the optimistic take; pessimistic conclusions can also be drawn.

While mainstream media organisations needed to hire private security to protect their journalists, others were out in the field without need of protection. These “alternative” media and “citizen journalists” included the Real Rukshan and the far-right Rebel News. Rukshan’s live YouTube feeds of the demonstration even gained the attention of mainstream media, which is one of many ironies. The protesters loved him, chanting his name when he appeared among them. He lacked the access to interview the premier or CFMEU boss John Setka, as he said on his livestream, but he could speak to the people on the streets.

All this is food for reflecting on the widespread hostility to mainstream media, and the difference between professional and “alternative” or “citizen” journalism.

Campaigns against mainstream media outlets from what we might broadly call the left have been a feature of the pandemic, especially in the lockdown capital, Melbourne. (I’m using the words left and right as a crude shorthand. They are inadequate descriptors of the spectrums of beliefs in the groups I am talking about.)

Rather than advocating violence, these campaigns have used social media to encourage people to cancel their subscriptions to the city’s newspapers, the Herald Sun and the Age, because they are perceived to have undermined the Labor state government’s public health measures and failed to take the side of their readers against business figures who want the lockdowns to end.

The longest-standing and most organised campaign has targeted the Herald Sun. It was begun by Dave Milner, a columnist for the Shot — itself an “alternative” outlet, and an offshoot of the Chaser — which has added reportage and commentary to its traditionally satirical repertoire. Milner wrote a series of articles excoriating the Murdoch press for its critical reporting of the first lockdown, and for doing an “appalling job of conveying what life is like here to the rest of the country… making a difficult situation even harder.”

In October last year, Milner drew a comparison with the British city of Liverpool, which successfully boycotted Rupert Murdoch’s Sun after it blamed the survivors of the 1989 Hillsborough stadium crush for the deaths of its ninety-six victims. The Herald Sun was doing something similar, he said, and deserved a similar boycott. “It needs to be socially unacceptable to read and sell the Herald Sun… Cafes shouldn’t stock it. Newsagents shouldn’t sell it. If people see it in the supermarket it should be moved to the toilet paper aisle where it belongs… This is personal now, like it was for Liverpool.”

In what Milner describes as an “organic” response to his articles, the Shot began to sell stickers and other items bearing slogans such as “Fuck Murdoch” and “Don’t Read the Herald Sun.” About 30,000 stickers have been sold, he says, mostly to Victorians. “Don’t Read the Herald Sun” and “Fuck the Herald Sun” remain the top sellers.

More recently, a much lower-key campaign, largely confined to Twitter, has run against the Age in the wake of its publishing what has become known as the “enough” editorial on 1 September this year. The Age called on public health authorities to better factor in the damage caused by lockdowns.

As media academic Denis Muller commented in the Conversation, it received a visceral reaction, feeding into the highly politicised narratives of hope and threat that have become inextricably bound up in the pandemic response in Australia. In a letter to subscribers about the “extraordinary” response, editor Gay Alcorn acknowledged that some people had cancelled their subscriptions, but said they were outweighed by new subscribers.

To its credit, the Age published letters to the editor slamming the editorial as well as boosting it, and also republished Muller’s piece.

I hope you’re getting the picture here. Mainstream media outlets no longer have the field to themselves. They are still key players, but in a messy, ratty, vibrant and sometimes frightening ecosystem. They are constantly being nipped and jabbed. At the extremes, during the far-right protests on Melbourne’s streets, their reporters have been threatened and physically attacked.

The Age’s “enough” editorial sparked a Twitter campaign kicked off by the anonymous @PRGuy17, in which people were urged to cancel their subscriptions. @PRGuy17 has been one of Twitter’s most prominent supporters of premier Dan Andrews and the #istandwithDan hashtag. (He did not respond when I sought comment.)

So have the campaigns calling on people to cancel their subscriptions had any impact in the world outside the silos of social and alternative media? The anecdotes are many, but the truth is hard to determine.

There’s no perfect way of measuring news media readership across all platforms, but the industry has made various attempts. This year the Enhanced Media Metrics Australia system, or EMMA, launched with fanfare eight years ago, was dropped and replaced by Think News Brands, or TNB, which uses data compiled by Roy Morgan. Whereas the EMMA data was published quarterly, the TNB figures have so far been available only in boosterish reports that don’t break down readership by individual masthead.

On request, though, TNB provided me with these figures for news readership among people fourteen and older at two points in the pandemic:

Herald Sun
June 2020: 4.593 million
June 2021: 4.719 million

Age
June 2020: 5.913 million
June 2021: 5.963 million

Not much encouragement there for the cancellation campaigners — and this pattern accords with research by the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre.

But I don’t think the TNB figures give us a definitive answer to the question of whether the mainstream media are pissing off their subscribers. They are based on the assumption that the outlets’ readership is a certain multiple of the numbers of paid subscriptions. News Corporation’s most recent quarterly earnings statement shows the Herald Sun has 146,026 paid subscribers, combined print and digital, as of 30 June 2021. The non-subscription paid circulation of its print masthead — through newsstands and newsagents — which wasn’t declared this year, was 213,964 in 2020.

As for the Age, the TNB–Roy Morgan report claims 5.9 million readers over the age of fourteen, which is about 400,000 more than Victoria’s total over-fourteen population.

Given these outlets are paywalled, how can they have readerships so much larger than their subscription and other paid-circulation base? Asked to explain, Roy Morgan offered “a couple of things to consider.” These included out-of-state readership on digital platforms, and the fact that some “off-platform aggregations,” such as Apple News, don’t have paywalls. The figures also included readership in cafes, offices and the like — though that would surely be insignificant during lockdown.

Even taking all that on board, I regard these figures as rubbery and optimistic. A reader revolt could well be hidden within them.

When I sought comment from the Age and News Corp about the impact of the campaigns, a News Corp spokesperson told me that paid subscriptions for the company’s Australian mastheads were growing strongly — from 647,600 in June last year to 810,000 this year — “demonstrating how strongly our journalism resonates with mainstream Australia.”

The editor of the Age, Gay Alcorn, sent a longer and more thoughtful response. She acknowledged that the paper was less than perfect. “Do we sometimes publish a poor headline? Yes. Do we sometimes do a story that I worry later was not quite there? Of course.” She said:

The accusation seems to be that anything critical or questioning of state government Covid policy is inherently undermining of public health messages and is therefore irresponsible to publish. It has been strange at times. A piece by Greens candidate Celeste Liddle questioning the Victorian curfew was attacked as irresponsible to publish — I am not sure most people who attacked the headline even read the piece. A piece by Jon Faine — who our conservative readers say is pro-Andrews — was attacked because he suggested that lockdown fatigue was real and the government had to change its language to reflect that. This was supposedly an example of Age hostility to Andrews.

I think our health and science coverage has been second to none. Our state political coverage is the best in Victoria. We have striven to go deeper, with Explainers and Q and As on complex issues. We have covered in depth the vaccine rollout, the long-term impact on the CBD economically and socially, the equity divide revealed by the pandemic, the impact on universities, the civil rights issues, Australians stranded overseas, and many more. Recently, we sought reader questions about what they wanted to know about the roadmap and were inundated with questions and we continue to answer them. That is useful journalism, essential during these times.

And in an increasingly polarised media landscape, she added, the Age was “different” because it sometimes challenged its readers’ prejudices.

This is an important point. Most professional journalists, asked to distinguish themselves from “citizen journalists” and alternative media, would reach for concepts such as adherence to the facts and impartiality.

But what are we to make of those claims when faced with front-page headlines from the Herald Sun such as “Premier’s Grab for Absolute Power” and “Dictator Dan no longer just a nickname.” The paper has run good, straight reporting on the pandemic as well, but at times it seems to believe that taking a provocative and partisan stance is just as much a part of its business model as it is for the Real Rukshan.

The Age has not been so partisan, but it too has sometimes mixed reportage with opinion and failed to adequately correct errors, including on public health matters.

All this means the line between professional and partisan “alternative” media is less clearly drawn than journalists like to pretend. Which is another way of saying that — even as business models erode and attacks mount — the mainstream needs to do better.

The University of Canberra research shows that trust in media among its survey respondents rose to 53 per cent at the beginning of the pandemic — a record figure. By June this year, though, just 43 per cent of respondents said they trusted the news media. Meanwhile the number of heavy news consumers had fallen back to four points below pre-pandemic levels.

These figures suggest that readers are indeed turning away. That should worry us all. As those protesters found, we all need information on which we can rely; without it, we are going round in circles, hardly knowing who or where we are. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Information warfare appeared first on Inside Story.

Feng’s 600,000 followers gave the adorably weird video half a million likes within three days. Feng had already won fans and courted controversy by modelling, stunningly, the dress style known as qipao. But this time, he went one “peach peach” too far. Douyin banned him from the platform, officially for soliciting virtual gifts from minors but also, according to the Global Times, because “numerous netizens” complained that his videos lacked “masculinity.”

The Communist Party of China wants boys to harden up. It has gender-bending niangpao (“girlie guns”) like Feng in its sights, along with other offenders against cis-gendered heteronormativity such as K-pop-inspired “little fresh meat” boy bands and anyone whose initials even appear to include LGBTQI. “Girlie guns” don’t need to be as extreme as Feng Xiaoyi. They may simply be boys who like wearing nice clothes, enjoy shopping, or have close female friends, who are self-effacing, gentle and timid — all of which are deemed signs of excessive “feminisation.” The masculinity drive is part of its campaign against “unhealthy” social tendencies such as excessive online gaming, celebrity worship, and any expression of queer life in films and TV.

In June, the father of a seven-year-old boy became a hero to gender nonconformists after posting on Zhihu (a Quora-like website) about the day his son, who liked wearing skirts, wore one to school. The teacher harshly reprimanded him: “Boys should act like boys.” When female classmates leapt to his defence, saying boys should be “free” to wear dresses too, the teacher snapped that “freedom” was “an American thing.” The father decried the teacher’s intolerance. His post went viral, attracting tens of thousands of likes and mostly supportive comments.

Like their counterparts elsewhere, many mainland Chinese, especially younger ones, perceive rigid gender-based norms as oppressive. They are pushing back against the official promotion of “masculinity” across social media. Even some official media, including the Global Times, have published contrary views.

Yet party advisers, bloggers and others whose opinions dominate state media frame the problem of boys not “acting like boys” as nothing less than a threat to the survival of the nation. In a widely republished post, the ultra-leftist blogger Li Guangman wrote that “if we allow this generation of young people to lose their mettle and masculinity, then who needs an enemy — we will have brought destruction upon ourselves, much like the Soviet Union back in the day.” Vladimir Putin, alongside Jordan Peterson, is something of a pin-up for the boys-should-be-boys brigade.

Patriotism is embedded in native Chinese concepts of masculinity. A common phrase signifying a “manly” man, nanzi han, dates back about 2000 years, and originally described defenders of the Han dynasty against the Xiungnu, or Hun. As for the qualities that define masculinity, these are usually summed up as yanggang zhi qi — the qi, or vital essence, of yang (broadly: male, bright or positive energy) plus gang (morally upright). The phrase has etymological roots going back at least as far as the sixth century.

Yet it’s not strictly gender-specific, as acknowledged in the title of a recent education ministry document on the “problem” of “feminised” Chinese boys: “The Cultivation of yanggang zhi qi Doesn’t Distinguish between Male and Female.” The phrase denotes qualities of mind as expressed in speech and action. But officially sanctioned remedies for building up boys’ yanggang zhi qi focus on ramping up sports and physical education and recruiting more male teachers as role models, even those less qualified than their female counterparts.

The focus on physicality reflects a national anxiety that originated during the late Qing dynasty. Beginning in the 1840s, Western imperialist powers bullied and attacked the Qing for the right to push opium into China, establish semi-colonial enclaves in its ports and exploit the country’s resources. Reformist thinkers argued that in the “struggle for existence,” the “physical vigour” of the populace was as decisive as intelligence and moral rectitude. They promoted calisthenics and military drills. This push continued years after the republican revolution of 1911. In one of his first published essays, a young Mao Zedong wrote about the importance of exercise (for women too). Shortly after the revolution of 1949, the Communist Party introduced universal morning calisthenics, performed to radio broadcasts.

The party today speaks of the need to return to “revolutionary,” “socialist” and “traditional” masculinity. Yet both the revolution and the period of “socialist construction” that began in 1949 demanded physical strength and courage — yanggang zhi qi — from both men and women.

As for “traditional masculinity,” the classical ideal of manhood was an educated man who was upright, filial to his parents and ancestors, loyal to his ruler, and ideally a fine calligrapher and poet as well. The third-century warrior general Guan Yu, later immortalised as Guan Gong, the God of War, is typically portrayed with bright red skin, the result of his brimming yang energy — as “masculine” as it gets. Yet despite a lack of solid evidence that Guan Yu was literate, he is often represented holding a scroll as well as a weapon — further elevating his status in a society that esteemed men’s educational accomplishments over physical prowess.

Traditional culture offers many different types of male archetypes. As a number of recent commentators have wryly noted, Jia Baoyu, the female company–loving young male protagonist of the great eighteenth-century novel Story of the Stone, is an archetypal “girlie gun.” Just as the early twentieth-century male player of female roles, Mei Lanfang, created some of the most exquisite archetypes of femininity in the Peking Opera, so did a later female player of male roles, Pei Yanling, give opera fans some of the most indelible performances of heroic masculinity.

The odd thing about the current masculinity panic is that by any measure, China today is militarily and economically stronger than at any other time in the last 150 years. And for all the pretty boy actors and singers testing the party with their sculpted eyebrows and designer clothes, there are plenty of muscular, hard-bodied action stars like Wu Jing of the wildly popular Wolf Warrior films.

So what gives? Does the existence of more diverse forms of masculinity threaten the nation — or just the patriarchy? Lü Pin, founder of the banned media channel Feminist Voices, suggested the latter when she told America’s NBC News that “the concept of masculinity forces every man to be tough, which excludes and harms men with other types of characteristics. It also reinforces men’s hegemony, control and position over women.” The Global Times quoted a law professor who similarly argued that gender stereotypes victimise both men and women, trapping men in a “suffocating, outdated masculinity stereotype, which supposes being vulnerable means being emasculated” and excludes “fear, grief or tenderness.”

Promoting “masculinity,” in other words, could mean that men end up resembling a certain rugged-featured older bloke who posted one of a number of online “peach peach” parodies. His video simultaneously sends up Feng Xiaoyi and stereotyped notions of masculinity. In it, he bellows like a drill sergeant: “EAT PEACH PEACH!” Take that, men men! •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Shooting down the “girlie guns” appeared first on Inside Story.

I departed Baltimore in the early evening. Interstate 95, the perpetually clogged corridor of the Eastern Seaboard, was emptier than I had ever seen it. Digital highway signs overhead declared “Save Lives Now. Stay Home.” I had never been in the vicinity of a war zone, but it occurred to me that it might feel something like this — only the most essential or foolhardy travellers on the roads, the rest of the world hunkered down.

Except there were no troop carriers or munitions haulers in this war zone. Instead, there were trucks. The majority of the few vehicles on the road were semitrailers, and the biggest group among them were Amazon trucks. I counted two dozen on the hundred-mile stretch between Baltimore and southern New Jersey, where it got too dark to see logos. I had seen many, many Amazon trucks on my travels around the country over the past few years. I had never seen a concentration anywhere close to this.

If we were in a war against the coronavirus, then Amazon was our troop carrier. In this war, mobilising to attack the enemy meant universal withdrawal and self-isolation, and Amazon was supplying that mobilisation by bringing us everything at home, allowing us to stay there. All at once, it had become our civic duty, our cause larger than ourselves, to fulfil our needs online. An act of convenience that had once been tinged — at least for some — with misgivings was now infused with righteousness. By placing a one-click order, one was flattening the curve.

The boxes came, in great numbers. Often, they sat on porches or in garages for a day or two in case they’d been tainted with viral particles by their delivery handler. When this quarantine passed, the boxes were allowed into the home.

The boxes came in such quantity, the orders were placed in such quantity, that the company famed for its peerless logistics operation was for once having trouble keeping up. It announced it was hiring 100,000 more workers at its warehouses, then a few weeks later announced it was hiring 75,000 more. It told buyers and third-party sellers that it was deprioritising orders deemed less than essential. In the most startling move of all, it briefly removed some of the web features intended to get shoppers to buy more from the site — Amazon was for once discouraging people from spending more money. The company had seen into the future, when it would truly be the Everything Store, the Be-All, End-All Store, but it wasn’t ready to carry it off. Not yet.

Such emergency measures were temporary. The usual buying goads returned, as did the non-essential items. It emerged that the company’s algorithms were in fact finding new ways to drive product makers to sell goods only on the site, rather than through other retailers. And as the peak of the spring 2020 national crisis passed, certain consequences became unmistakable. The pandemic had taken a series of related developments in American life and accelerated them to hyper-speed, like a film reel gone haywire.

The news organisations that had already lost the majority of their advertising revenue to Silicon Valley were now losing what little remained as a result of the halt in commerce. To try to survive, many furloughed their entire newsrooms, on rotating shifts, leaving them understaffed to cover first one huge story, the pandemic, and then another, the protests over George Floyd’s death at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis.

The legacy retail companies that had survived the upheaval of the prior two decades were now careening towards extinction. JCPenney, Neiman Marcus and J.Crew filed for bankruptcy. Macy’s temporarily shuttered all 775 of its stores and furloughed nearly all of its 125,000 workers; after its stock fell by 75 per cent in two months, it was dropped from the S&P 500. Amazon’s Seattle neighbour, Nordstrom, announced it was laying off thousands. The toll was no less widespread among the country’s independent businesses. All told, 25,000 retail stores were expected to go out of business by the end of 2020, a figure that nearly tripled the mass closure figures of recent years.

Meanwhile, the companies that had for several decades been capitalising on the trends reshaping the economy were growing larger and more successful in what seemed like the exact inverse of the economic haemorrhage under way all across the country. By late May, the five biggest tech companies — Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google’s Alphabet — had added a stunning US$1.7 trillion to their combined market cap in just two months, a rise of 43 per cent. The combined value of only these five companies was now a fifth of the S&P 500.

And they were only going to grow larger: the five were sitting on a combined US$557 billion in cash. They used it to finance new acquisitions and raise their spending on research and development to nearly US$30 billion a year — more than NASA’s entire budget — even as their smaller rivals were retrenching. “What is unusual at this moment is the extreme divergence in the health of different types of companies,” wrote economist Austan Goolsbee, a former adviser to Barack Obama. “Many of the biggest are flush with money, while smaller competitors have never been in more precarious shape.”

The biggest winner of all was Amazon. Its first-quarter sales were up by more than 25 per cent over those the year prior — this, at a time when overall retail sales were plunging. Its stock surged so much in mid April — up by more than 30 per cent on the previous year, as the pandemic was nearing its deadliest period — that Jeff Bezos’s net worth increased by US$24 billion in the span of only two months. In late July, Amazon announced that its profit had doubled in the second quarter, with sales up by a stunning 40 per cent from those a year earlier. On the news, its share price surged yet higher — by early September, it was up by 84 per cent on the year, more than double the rise of other tech giants. “Simply put, Covid-19, in our view, has injected Amazon with a growth hormone,” wrote one industry analyst in a note to investors.

To handle the surge in business, the company had added more than 425,000 employees worldwide between January and October, bringing its total number of non-seasonal employees in the United States to 800,000 and its global total to more than 1.2 million — up by half from a year earlier and now behind only Walmart and China National Petroleum (and that tally didn’t even include the 500,000 drivers who were delivering its packages). To house these workers, the company went on a building and leasing spree, opening one hundred buildings in September on its way to occupying nearly one hundred million additional square feet of warehouse space by the end of 2020, a roughly 50 per cent increase. Its warehouses weren’t the only part of the company in high demand: its data centres were ramping up capacity for customers like Zoom, as hundreds of millions of daily human interactions shifted online.

The midsummer announcement of Amazon’s massive pandemic profits had come on the same day that the federal commerce department reported that the US economy had shrunk by nearly 10 per cent, the largest quarterly drop on record. In other words, Amazon was flourishing more than ever before at one of the lowest moments for the country as a whole: the fates of the company and the nation had diverged entirely.

Such profound imbalance in fortunes had contributed greatly to the political convulsions of the era. And, as the dread year of 2020 neared its close, it was plain that one of the first orders of business facing the newly elected president, Joe Biden, and his incoming administration would be deciding how to address the divergence. The nation could hardly afford for it to grow any wider.

In Baltimore, a twenty-six-year-old woman named Shayla Melton was trying to decide whether to go back to work at Amazon. She had been working as a picker at the Broening Highway warehouse, where the GM plant used to be, until she had her baby, her second child, just as the pandemic was arriving. Her husband also worked as a picker, but at the other Amazon warehouse, at Sparrows Point, and he, too, had taken time off from the job, because there had been a lot of coronavirus cases there.

The company’s initial reaction to the pandemic was to announce that it was seeding a charitable fund for its temp workers and contract delivery drivers who lacked health coverage and to encourage the public to donate to it. This met with some derision. It also promised two weeks of paid leave to anyone with a Covid-19 diagnosis and offered unpaid time off, without risk of being penalised for missing shifts, to anyone who wanted to stay home as a precaution. It offered a temporary US$2 bump in hourly pay to those who kept working. It set up temperature checks and Covid-19 testing stations for arriving workers. It issued masks and provided hand sanitiser and disinfectant.

Hector Torrez, who once had a highly paid tech-industry job, watched the measures go into effect at the warehouse in Thornton, Colorado, where he was now stacking, packing and loading. A small army of cleaners came in one day, wearing what looked like suits from Ghostbusters. The usual group stretching routine at shift start was cancelled, which made the physical work only riskier, as did the fact that jobs like loading boxes into trucks now had to be done solo, without a partner. What most upset Hector was the contrast with the company’s headquarters employees, who were being allowed — encouraged — to work from home.

Meanwhile, the new hires kept arriving. Several had backgrounds as elevated as Torrez’s own: a former industrial engineer, a former litigator, a former owner of a real estate firm. “What I see around me is a lot of people who don’t have much choice,” he said. “We’re economic refugees.” Many other workers were quite young, and Hector would strike up conversations with them and urge them to move on as quickly as they could. “Time passes,” he told them. “Get out when you still have time, and can still make a decision.”

At the company’s warehouses in France, union demands over safety measures had forced a weeks-long shutdown and an eventual deal that included a reduction of shifts by fifteen minutes, without a reduction to pay, to allow for more social distancing at crowded shift changes. In the absence of unions at the US warehouses, discontent took other forms. “Welcome to Hell” read the graffiti inside truck trailers, out of sight of warehouse cameras. “Fuck Bezos.” Workers began sharing their disquiet in online back channels, and at some warehouses, they organised protests, signalling that the pandemic just might set in motion a new era of workplace activism.

The company moved to head off any such swell. It fired a worker who organised a walkout at the huge warehouse in Staten Island, saying he violated safety protocol by coming to the warehouse while under self-quarantine for having had contact with an infected worker. It also fired two headquarters employees in Seattle who had spoken up for the protesting warehouse workers.

More than worker activism alone would be necessary to provide a check on so vast and powerful a company, as well as its fellow industry giants. It would require federal action. Joe Biden’s election victory showed a continuation of the political trends of the era: Democrats strengthened their hold on wealthy suburbs, while making up scant ground in the struggling rural areas and small towns that had elected Donald Trump. Ominously for Democrats, there were signs that, as they transformed into the party of highly educated urban professionals, their erosion of support in white working-class communities was spreading to Hispanic voters and Black men.

It will be up to Biden, his new administration and Democrats in Congress to decide whether to deal with that erosion, and the great class and regional imbalances that lie behind it, by challenging their party’s long-time natural allies in the tech industry. •

This is an edited extract from Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, published this week by Scribe.

The post When Amazon comes to town appeared first on Inside Story.

While Davison didn’t identify himself as an incel, his actions echo those of men associated with this movement. In 2014, for example, Elliot Rodger killed six people in a shooting in Isla Vista, California, and in 2018 Alek Minassian drove a rented van through a pedestrian mall in Toronto, killing ten. Each of these men made clear their allegiance to incels.

These killings helped fuel concern about misogynist violence, and particularly violence linked to online forums. As Donna Zuckerberg, who happens to be the sister of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, argued in her 2018 book on the issue, “social media has elevated misogyny to entirely new levels of violence and virulence.”

A newly released report from a global team of researchers led by Manoel Horta Ribeiro backs up some of these concerns, finding that online anti-women groups, including incels and “men going their own way” (men who believe relationships with women are so toxic they are best avoided altogether), appear to be growing. Using data collected from forums like Gab and Reddit, the researchers also found the level of toxicity in the “manosphere” had risen significantly.

Policymakers have also expressed concern. In March this year the director-general of ASIO, Mike Burgess, described how a growing number of extremists no longer fit the left–right spectrum and are instead “motivated by a fear of societal collapse or a specific social or economic grievance or conspiracy.” Incels were among the groups ASIO is taking more seriously, he said.

Despite the new labels, the ideas motivating these groups are not entirely new. They follow on from a longer-standing men’s rights movement that has had significant influence, despite its relatively low profile, in key areas of family policy, particularly during and since the Howard government.

The men’s rights movement originated in the United States, where figures such as Warren Farrell, who was once a prominent male feminist, created a movement to oppose what they describe as “institutional misandry,” or hatred of men. Focusing primarily on political activism, these groups have campaigned on issues including a perceived bias against men when custody battles go to court, a belief that men are as much victims of domestic violence as are women, and the need for a greater focus on suicide rates, education levels and deaths in the workplace among men.

Several men’s rights organisations have been working on these issues for decades in Australia. Groups including Fathers4Equality, the Men’s Rights Agency and the Australian Men’s Rights Association have focused primarily on father’s rights, with the Family Court being a core concern. The Australian Men’s Rights Association, for example, argues that an “epidemic” of fatherlessness is hurting children, and has pushed against laws that separate men from their children. They also, somewhat paradoxically, provide men with advice on DNA paternity testing to overcome what they believe is a trend of “paternity fraud.”

Despite their relatively low profile, these groups have had some influence in conservative politics. In 2006 the Howard government amended the Family Law Act to prioritise a child’s right to have access to both parents in the case of divorce. While the legislation offered an exemption in cases of domestic abuse, there is evidence that the shift has resulted in some abusive men having ongoing access to their children.

One of the key advocates for this change was Bettina Arndt, who advised the Howard government on family law and child support issues. Arndt, who was controversially awarded an Order of Australia in 2020, has followed a similar trajectory to many men’s rights activists. Previously a self-proclaimed feminist, she now believes that radical feminism’s critique of men’s behavour has damaged relations between the sexes.

In recent years Arndt has fashioned herself into one of Australia’s leading men’s rights activists. “Now it is men’s lives we aren’t allowed to speak about — the very real problems confronting men and boys in our male-bashing society,” she wrote in her 2018 book, #MenToo. She has become a staple on conservative TV, and frequently appears on Sky News Australia, where men’s rights issues have become a topic of concern.

But other groups have recently taken a higher profile. The Australian Brotherhood of Fathers, or ABF, which has more than 70,000 likes on Facebook, is one of the most active. Its Facebook page discusses the perceived injustices of the family law system and the plight of men denied access to their children.

Mothers of Sons — launched in 2020 at an online forum hosted by the conservative commentator Prue MacSween and featuring NSW One Nation MP Mark Latham — is run by a “group of ordinary women whose sons have faced extraordinary ordeals in our unfair, anti-male legal systems and workplaces.” Mothers of Sons holds to the belief that some women make “false accusations” of sexual assault and domestic violence against men, and rails against the “excesses” of the #MeToo movement.

Like Arndt in the early 2000s, these groups are also achieving some political success, although through different avenues. In recent years men’s rights groups have found favour within Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. In 2019, for example, after lobbying by the ABF and members of the “Blokes Advice” Facebook group, Hanson successfully moved for a parliamentary inquiry into the family law system, which is chaired by herself and the former Liberal minister, and high-profile social conservative, Kevin Andrews.

The ABF argues that twenty-one Australian men commit suicide each week following family breakdown, and link this to failures of the family law system. The figure is highly contested, and even former Queensland One Nation leader Steve Dickson, a key men’s rights supporter within One Nation, concedes it is anecdotal. That hasn’t stopped its being taken up more widely by men’s groups.

In pushing for the inquiry, Hanson herself promoted that other, highly contested, belief of the men’s rights movement — that women frequently lie about domestic violence and rape in order to get back at men. “There are people out there who are nothing but liars and who will use that in the court system,” she claimed.

The committee is still at work on its inquiry, but One Nation has already adopted many of the demands of the men’s rights movement as part of its policy platform. The party’s family law policy, for example, takes the view that apprehended violence orders and other court orders shouldn’t necessarily restrict parents’ access to their children, and that allegations of abuse should only be heard during divorce proceedings if they are accompanied by medical records or a criminal conviction.

Although the men’s rights movement has had a growing influence on the conservative side of politics in Australia, Ribeiro and his colleagues found that this older variety of activism is becoming less popular, while groups like the incels and men going their own way are thriving.

Reflecting longstanding assumptions about inherent differences between men and women, men’s and manosphere rights groups often focus on reinforcing traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity. Thus, they believe the gender pay gap reflects women’s inherent desire to spend less time than men in paid work rather than structural problems in the labour force. Using ideas from evolutionary psychology, the manosphere focuses on these supposed differences in sexual and romantic relationships – arguing that women engage in “hypergamy,” a strategy in which they only date men of a higher social, economic or physical status.

The “manosphere” is therefore distinct from the older men’s rights groups in a number of ways. First, its members are less focused on political activism and more on fixing their personal lives. Manosphere discussion primarily focuses on sex and relationships, and features constant complaints about women, sex and love.

The second major difference between the newer groups and their predecessors is their online focus. Men’s rights activists act in the same way as other established political groups, with men getting together in meeting rooms, in conference halls and, occasionally, on the streets. The manosphere meets most often on Reddit, 4Chan, YouTube, Gab and other social media.

While the influence of the internet in fostering extremism is often overstated, it has had a direct influence on how these groups form and operate. My own research has found that men in these communities have relatively weak connections with each other online. They are attached to the idea of the manosphere but don’t find a deep social connection with others. They often remain deeply socially isolated, sitting at home, online, growing angrier about their lives with no one there to support them.

Other researchers have found that the architecture of social media platforms can push participants towards more toxic and extreme discussion. Research by Tiana Gaudette and colleagues, for example, found that Reddit’s voting function normalised radical anti-Muslim and anti-left sentiment in the forum dedicated to support of Donald Trump. Voting was used to mobilise members around these sentiments, creating the sense that participants are part of an in-group opposed to an identified out-group. Reddit’s upvoting feature produced a “one-sided narrative that serves to reinforce members’ extremist views,” wrote Gaudette and her colleagues, “thereby strengthening bonds between members of the in-group.” My research finds that these sorts of trends are viewable in the manosphere as well.

These new features create a noxious combination. Alongside ongoing social isolation, the belief in essential differences between men and women fosters a form of nihilism in which men see no solution for the problems they are facing. Matched with growing extremist content, this can create an environment of hatred and misogyny, which can push some individuals to undertake deadly attacks.

Australia has yet to see any incel-motivated attacks of the kind experienced in the United States, Canada and Britain. But does that mean the threat doesn’t exist?

The influence of these groups is often harder to measure than traditional men’s rights groups. While many of the online communities are very large, it is impossible to know individuals’ locations or level of commitment.

Some signs suggest that the influence of the manosphere is present in Australia. Prior to the pandemic, influential American manosphere activists frequently made Australia a destination. In 2017, for instance, filmmaker Cassie Jaye visited the country promoting her movie The Red Pill. Taken from the movie The Matrix, the Red Pill is a term used by these groups to describe the process of learning the harsh truths about feminism. Local men’s groups organised screenings of the movie, and Jaye made several high-profile media appearances.

Later, in 2019, Canadian conservative and anti-feminist thinker Jordan Peterson sold out theatres across the country promoting his anti-feminist self-help text 12 Rules for Life. While he is unlikely to see himself as a member of the community, Peterson is famous in the manosphere, particularly for his perceived tendency to “destroy” feminists in interviews or forums.

Similarly, the “seduction industry,” made up of companies and individuals that teach men a range of (often coercive) tactics in order to “pick up” women, has had a presence in Australia for well over a decade. Way back in 2014, Julien Blanc, who has publicly advocated for men to coerce women, had his visa revoked while on a trip to Sydney. Despite this controversy these groups have stayed strong. Early last year the Sydney bookstore Kinokuniya announced a ban on such behaviour when it discovered that pick-up artists were operating on its premises.

The views of these groups are unlikely to represent a significant portion of the Australian population, or even of Australian men. Like the men’s rights movement, the manosphere is relatively small, both globally and in Australia. Yet, with its growth online and its influence in politics, it is a force worth watching. If even one of its members decides to take out his anger in the real world, as happened in Britain just weeks ago, the consequences could be very serious.

Of course, some of the complaints made by these men are well founded. Male suicide rates are extremely high, as are deaths in the workplace. It is also true that men are, at times, the victims of domestic abuse and rape, and as victims are sometimes ignored. Boys often fall behind in our schools, and men face high levels of mental ill-health. These are all issues that need serious attention.

But the ire of the manosphere is directed at feminism rather than the real causes of these problems, and too frequently turns misogynistic. While claiming they stand for gender equality, these groups undermine the serious work needed to achieve it. •

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Now imagine checking your pockets. Where’s your mobile phone? You don’t have one. There’s no connected personal computer on your desk, no social media hoovering up data about your spending habits, and not much need for businesses to import or export elaborate datasets. Facial recognition technology is still the stuff of science fiction and your car isn’t sending valuable information back to its manufacturer.

Nineteen eighty-eight was the year Australia’s privacy legislation was implemented with the worthy goal of protecting your personal information. It seemed a realistic ambition back then, because that information was probably stored in a filing cabinet rather than on the server of a tech giant in the Santa Clara Valley. Getting your name struck off a mailing list or making sure your medical records didn’t fall into the wrong hands was still within the powers of domestic legislation.

Even the right to be forgotten needed no articulation: if you kept out of the news for long enough, your past misdemeanours would fade into oblivion — a secret between you and the rare person spooling through old newspapers on dusty microfiche at the local library.

What we didn’t know at the time was that 1988’s Privacy Act was a snapshot of a society on the cusp of a technological revolution. Think of it as one of those moments captured in a photo taken just minutes before a natural calamity — the tourists are all smiling at the camera, blissfully unaware of the avalanche that’s about to engulf them.

Since then, Australian legislators have done their best to keep pace with technological change. The most recent and perhaps most significant amendment to the 1988 legislation created the 2018 Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, which details what must happen if personal data hosted by a company goes missing or is hacked.

But the technological advances of the past thirty years are so great that mere amendments will no longer suffice. The Privacy Act doesn’t need tweaking; it needs a root-and-branch rethink. And it’s not just a question of individual privacy; the challenge we’re facing is how to apply economy-wide privacy protections that will allow Australian companies to safeguard data without stopping them from competing globally.

Privacy mightn’t have been the main focus of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s 2019 digital platforms report, but it highlighted what was already clear to informed observers: the Privacy Act was out of date. The wheels of government ground slowly for another year or so before attorney-general Christian Porter launched a review of the legislation. It would focus, according to his no-nonsense press release, on “technical data and other online identifiers.”

Oddly, given Australia was lagging behind the rest of the Western world, the announcement betrayed no sense of urgency. The European Union had adopted its General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, two years earlier, after years of debate and horsetrading. California’s Consumer Privacy Act, covering Silicon Valley, was being finalised. Legislators in New Zealand had already put the final touches on their revamp of the country’s 1993 Privacy Act. South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act was by then one of the sharpest pieces of privacy legislation in the world. To use a Morrisonian euphemism, Australia’s policymakers obviously didn’t see protecting privacy as a race.

Information commissioner Angelene Falk at Senate estimates in March this year. Sitthixay Ditthavong/Canberra Times

Still, the review’s riding instructions did focus on the key issues, starting with the relationship between any future legislation and the West’s toughest privacy regime, the GDPR, which guards access to the second-largest consumer market. Should Australia’s new rules be immediately compatible with the GDPR — thus granting Australian digital businesses the protections they need to do business in the bloc? Or should Canberra apply for what’s referred to as adequacy status with the GDPR, once the new legislation is in place (as South Korea has done)? Or, indeed, should Australia go its own way and try to lock in data-transfer agreements with other jurisdictions, including the American states following California’s lead, or post-Brexit Britain, which is facing its own struggles dealing with the GDPR’s stringencies?

The attorney-general also appeared to acknowledge that any new system would depend on tough enforcement — which would place the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, Australia’s underfunded and overworked privacy watchdog, at its centre. Will the agency be given the resources it needs to ensure that privacy safeguards are adhered to? How will the low-profile information commissioner, Angelene Falk, manage the challenge parliament sets her and her office?

There’s nothing academic about these questions. If the European experience tells us anything, it’s that unenforced privacy laws are more or less useless. In fact, you could argue Australia is better off sticking to its pre-digital, Hawke-era legislation than drafting rules that don’t beef up a regulator that today oversees both the 1988 Privacy Act and the 1982 Freedom of Information Act. The stakes are unusually high.

Europe’s enforcement gap is best illustrated by the legendary story of Max Schrems, who took on Facebook and won. The Big Tech giant might have emerged as the villain of the piece, but the public utterances of the Austrian privacy activist, whose journey culminated in all transatlantic data transfers being shut down, portray Europe’s privacy regulators as part of the problem.

Schrems had been a student on exchange at a university in California’s Silicon Valley. In one class, a Facebook lawyer revealed that the company saw the European Union’s pre-GDPR privacy rules as something of a joke. The company was exporting European data without any ethical soul-searching or legal concern.

Although Schrems wasn’t an avid Facebook user — he says he had typically logged on once a week over three years — he decided to request all the information the company had accumulated about him. Because Facebook had, and still has, EU headquarters in Dublin, he was able to use EU right-of-access laws to obtain the data. And he got it — all 1200 pages’ worth. It even included information that Facebook had described as “deleted.” He uploaded the information to his website and soon attracted media attention from across Europe.

The campaign eventually made its way to the European Court of Justice, with Schrems arguing that the EU’s “safe harbour” arrangement with the United States — now known as the EU–US Privacy Shield — didn’t protect EU users. His claims piggybacked on revelations by US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, which pointed to a network of global surveillance programs run by the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The European Union had allowed for the free flow of data between the EU and the US because it assumed that both sides had equivalent standards of data protection — what’s now called equivalency. In two decisions since 2015, prompted by Schrems, the European Court of Justice rejected that premise, putting the future of data exchanges across the Atlantic under a cloud. It’s a cautionary tale for any jurisdiction — including Australia — facing the prospect of interacting with the GDPR. Like it or not, the EU’s privacy rules have set the global standard for privacy legislation.

And this is where the role of national data-protection agencies comes into play. To get to the European courts, Schrems had to pass through Ireland’s privacy regulator, the Data Protection Commission. The reason is simple: Ireland’s generous tax arrangements are so appealing to Big Tech that many of them — Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Amazon, PayPal, Airbnb, Uber and, yes, Facebook — have based their European headquarters in Dublin’s Silicon Docks. Anyone lodging a complaint against these companies must therefore turn to the Data Protection Commission.

In Schrems’s case, it didn’t go well. The Irish regulator dismissed his claims, prompting him to take action in Ireland’s courts. The case shone a spotlight on the regulator’s ability to manage the massive workload created by the tech giants’ Dublin addresses. Earlier this year, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties found that the regulator decided just four of 196 cases it had been required to take on — suggesting it had become the bottleneck of EU privacy enforcement. That failure, said the council, exposes 448 million people across the European Union to “electoral manipulation and predatory profiling.”

Schrems’s vicissitudes showed that an enforcer that can’t or doesn’t do its job fosters an environment in which the misuse of personal data goes unchallenged.

That Australia’s information commissioner is overworked and underfunded is now widely accepted. Her office received $25.5 million for the 2021–22 financial year, up marginally from last year’s $23.2 million. This increase included funds for a new freedom-of-information commissioner, a slight increase in staffing levels, and an earmarked amount for participating in Australia’s growing data-portability initiative, the Consumer Data Right.

This funding doesn’t reflect the size of the challenge — and the information commissioner knows it. Documents released under FOI earlier this year reveal a deficit of $121,000 last financial year as the watchdog struggled with managing the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme and overseeing the ill-fated COVIDSafe app. The document noted the agency’s “static resourcing and staffing levels” and went on to say that the information commissioner had experienced a “steady increase in the number of complaints received,” partly as a result of the pandemic.

Taking on Big Tech requires time, strong international contacts and a high level of expertise — all of which cost money. The information commissioner is already fighting Facebook in the Federal Court of Australia over the Cambridge Analytica data breach — a lawsuit almost identical to one that came unstuck in Canada in February because of a lack of evidence. Other investigations have involved time-consuming and resource-intensive international probes. Last week’s determination that Uber had failed to protect its clients and its drivers following a 2016 cyber attack saw the commissioner delve into what her office described as “significant jurisdictional matters and complex corporate arrangements and information flows.”

Once Australia’s new privacy legislation comes into operation, the resourcing of the commissioner’s office — or the agency that will replace it — is likely to be the key to success. Max Schrems managed to overturn the Privacy Shield by claiming his individual privacy rights in both Irish and EU courts, but it’s unrealistic to expect an individual to take on the burden of challenging Big Tech on privacy.

Given the pressure she is under, Angelene Falk may have good reason to keep a low media profile. With a background in law, she came to the job in 2018 after serving as deputy commissioner for two years. Her public appearances are usually limited to comments in Senate estimates, where she’s quizzed by parliamentarians who are often ill at ease with the principles of privacy and data protection and have little understanding of global policy trends.

Compare this with New Zealand’s privacy commissioner, John Edwards, who rarely misses a chance to publicly castigate Big Tech and wasn’t afraid to throw his weight around as the country approached its ambitious reimagining of the 1993 Privacy Act. Under the reforms, Edwards has the power to issue compliance notices, can make binding decisions on requests for access, and will oversee legislation that contains criminal offences for businesses that misuse personal data. Reportedly being considered for the top privacy-enforcement role in Britain, Edwards has become the public face of data protection in New Zealand — an outreach and educational role that has no equivalent in Australia.

The impasse over the EU–US Privacy Shield isn’t likely to be resolved soon. At the heart of the European judges’ objections is the fear that data exported to the US could fall into the hands of law-enforcement agencies. This is a tricky problem to manage — the US has no federal data-protection legislation or enforcer. With little appetite for privacy policy in Washington, the states have been left to take the lead.

More importantly, though, the clash with the EU over privacy has created a political problem for the Biden administration. The White House doesn’t want to be seen as soft on law and order — particularly when it comes to the crunching of data and the gathering of personal information that could, say, prevent terrorist attacks. Significant concessions to the Europeans could leave Biden politically exposed.

Any new Australian privacy legislation will face the same political predicament. Equivalency with the GDPR simply can’t be ignored — the European Union is too significant a market for Australia to deal itself out of the game. But Australian policymakers will also be mindful of the European Court of Justice’s low tolerance of loose regulation in countries gaining access to the personal data of EU citizens.

One cause for concern is Australia’s controversial 2018 Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act. That legislation is what you’d expect from a home affairs minister — Peter Dutton at the time — unconstrained by worries about the economic impact of Australia’s data-protection reputation. The act, which includes no judicial oversight, gives the Australian government the right to demand a “back door” into encrypted communications — including those sent via popular apps including WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram. It was designed to help federal police and intelligence agencies track suspected criminals and terrorists.

Australia’s tech community opposed the legislation, and broadly still does, arguing that it undermines the country’s data-protection credibility. In a parliamentary hearing last year, the head of government affairs for the hugely successful Sydney-based software company Atlassian, Patrick Zhang, said that international tech companies were now afraid of using Australian products because of the possibility of receiving access orders from Australian law-enforcement agencies. This fear was particularly acute in Europe, Zhang suggested, where worries about tripping over the GDPR’s data-protection provisions mean that businesses may  steer clear of Australian products. Those fears might even spill over into third countries that don’t want to compromise their deals with the European Union.

The passing of that legislation suggests that Australia’s political priorities may ultimately trump the privacy concerns of the local tech industry. While a survey by the information commissioner revealed that Australians are keenly aware of the need to protect privacy, that attitude doesn’t translate into a broader understanding of how data-protection measures could affect Australian technology companies’ ability to compete.

Part of the problem could be the lack of a strong public voice promoting privacy in Australia. But decisions about new laws will ultimately come down to politics. Not everyone will understand the complexities of data-transfer rules, but you don’t need an information campaign to tell people that strong laws are needed to fight terrorism, international drug cartels and paedophile networks. If that means compromising WhatsApp’s encryption and ruling Australia out of international data transfers — so be it. If securing Australia’s digital sovereignty will get the nose of a few tech entrepreneurs out of joint, that’s a price that politicians of all persuasions may be willing to pay. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post The price of privacy appeared first on Inside Story.

A decade ago, former members of Intelligence Unit 8200, the Israeli defence forces outfit responsible for collecting and decrypting signals intelligence, set up a Tel Aviv–based cybertechnology company called NSO Group Technologies. By 2019 the company was valued at approximately US$1 billion. You can buy an awful lot of secondhand books — and quite a few secondhand bookshops, for that matter — with that kind of dough.

The company’s big money-spinner is a digital surveillance technology called Pegasus, which it licenses to governments around the world. Israel has strict rules on exporting this type of spyware, but it has never knocked back a request from NSO to sell its products overseas.

Pegasus is an authoritarian’s dream come true. It can give you secret access to the phone calls, texts, photos and emails of just about anyone with a smartphone. It will track the phone’s location and collect any data it transmits to Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype and other apps. It even allows you to secretly activate a smartphone’s microphones and cameras, turning targets’ phones into bugging devices they carry everywhere with them. I imagine the sales pitch is pretty concise: “Dear Mr Authoritarian, wouldn’t you love to get inside your enemy’s smartphone?”

The existence of Pegasus is no big secret. NSO freely admits it has sixty government agency clients — spies and cops, presumably — in forty countries, but it says its clients are “the good guys,” who use Pegasus to fight terrorism and crime. And anyway, it’s the clients who are responsible for using the spyware, not NSO Group.

Since around 2016, however, tenacious journalists and hardworking watchdog groups have been exposing how NSO’s clients have misused Pegasus. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn that some governments have used this cybersurveillance technology to abuse the human rights of reporters and political opponents.

The New York Times reported in 2019, for example, that the Mexican government had used Pegasus not only to capture the drug kingpin El Chapo, but also to track and harass at least two dozen journalists whose work it didn’t like. The same article reported how another client of NSO Group, the United Arab Emirates, used Pegasus to spy on Ahmed Mansoor, a prominent human rights activist. Mansoor was arrested in 2017 by UAE authorities and is serving a ten-year sentence for using social media platforms to “publish false and misleading information.”

Last week, the negative publicity about NSO Group and Pegasus went up a couple of notches. Someone leaked 50,000 phone numbers of potential Pegasus surveillance targets to Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based organisation that safely stores the work of threatened journalists from around the world, and the human rights group Amnesty International.

Following the template established by previous worldwide mega-leaks, including the Panama Papers in 2016, a consortium of seventeen media organisations, including the Washington Post and the Guardian, has been checking and publishing the stories arising from the leak.

At the start, the Pegasus Project had two jobs: to find out who owned these phone numbers, and then to get as many phones as possible into a lab for analysis.

In the end, Amnesty International’s Security Lab was able to forensically analyse sixty-seven smartphones supplied to them by human rights activists and journalists. Amnesty’s boffins found that thirty-seven had either been penetrated or tampered with by Pegasus. As a back-up, Amnesty’s work was peer-reviewed by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

Meanwhile, more than eighty journalists working on the project were able to establish that many of the leaked numbers were indeed the real numbers of activists, dissidents, journalists, government officials, politicians and even heads of state (“three presidents, ten prime ministers and a king,” according to the Washington Post).

This looks like strong evidence that at least some NSO clients are misusing NSO Group’s technology. Predictably, the company disputes the claim that the leaked phone numbers are surveillance targets. A lawyer representing the company declared to Forbidden Stories that “the data has many legitimate and entirely proper uses [and has] nothing to do with surveillance or with NSO.”

In a statement to the Pegasus Project, NSO Group said it “will continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action based on the results of these investigations. This includes [the] shutting down of a customer’s system, something NSO has proven its ability and willingness to do… and will not hesitate to do again if a situation warrants.”

Amnesty International’s secretary general, Agnès Callamard, is having none of this. “NSO Group can no longer hide behind the claim that its spyware is only used to fight crime,” she said this week. “It appears that Pegasus is also the spyware of choice for those wanting to snoop on foreign governments.”

The revelations of the Pegasus Project highlighted the need for strong regulation to rein in a wild west surveillance industry, Callamard went on. “States must implement a global moratorium on the export, sale, transfer and use of surveillance equipment until a robust human rights–compliant regulatory framework is in place. The Israeli government should also not authorise licences for the export of NSO Group’s cybersurveillance technology if there is a substantial risk it could be used for human rights violations.”

There are over seven billion people on Earth and five billion of them are attached to their phone as if it’s an extra limb. As the British anthropologist Daniel Miller puts it, “The smartphone is no longer just a device that we use, it’s become the place where we live.” And the NSO Group has created a very efficient crowbar for getting inside. •

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Amazon and Netflix are giants of the online economy. Both launched in the 1990s and survived the Tech Wreck of the early 2000s. Amazon is now an uber-giant, one of five US firms with a market capitalisation of more than US$1 trillion at the time of writing; Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet/Google and Facebook are the others. At around US$240 billion, Netflix is much smaller, though still among the largest twenty-five US companies.

For the authors of these books, innovation and invention are the markers of the two enterprises and the era they inhabit. “In the industrial era, the goal was to minimise variation,” says Netflix’s Reed Hastings. Today, in the information age, in creative companies, “maximising variation is more essential.” “Creativity, speed and agility” rather than “error prevention and replicability” are the goals for “many companies and… many teams.”

Yet the authors also attribute the two companies’ success to the steadiness and clarity of their central missions: Amazon’s belief that the long-term interests of shareholders coincide with the interests of customers, its obsession with customers rather than competitors, its “willingness to think long-term,” its “eagerness to invent” and its pride in “operational excellence.” Netflix too is “highly aligned,” concentrated on what Hastings calls “Our North Star,” “building a company that is able to adapt quickly as unforeseen opportunities arise and business conditions change.”

Pursuing these steady visions over more than two decades, Amazon and Netflix have radically changed what they do. An online bookstore became “The Everything Store,” as journalist Brad Stone titled his first book about Amazon. (His second, Amazon Unbound, was published earlier this year.) It started manufacturing and selling its own products, hosting other sellers, and selling services it built for itself to external parties. Amazon Web Services is now a behemoth in its own right. Netflix began as a DVD rental company that licensed other companies’ movies and TV shows, before moving into online streaming and producing its own Netflix Originals.

These were not mere pivots, they were deeply transforming, changing fundamentally the staff skills, the organisational competencies and the business partners needed for success. At the same time, both enterprises moved beyond the United States, seeking online customers, dealing with regulatory and political challenges, sometimes establishing distant operations and employing local people. Globalising the businesses massively increased their size and complexity. It also expanded the potential audience for books like these that try to explain the secret sauces.

Both books bring some outside perspective to what are essentially insider accounts. Colin Bryar and Bill Carr had long careers at Amazon before co-founding a business where they “coach executives at both large and early-stage companies on how to implement the management practices developed at Amazon.” They are writing, in part, for potential clients.

No Rules Rules is about the company Reed Hastings co-founded, and is co-written by him and Erin Meyer — actually, it is a kind of dialogue constructed by alternating, individually written sections. Meyer is an “American living in Paris” who has worked with Netflix and conducted a lot of interviews with staff for this book. A professor at INSEAD Business School’s Fontainebleau campus, she explores “how the world’s most successful managers navigate the complexities of cultural differences in a global environment.” Hastings, one suspects, wants this book to help attract talented staff to the fluid, personally rewarding organisation it portrays.

“Working Backwards” is the title of Bryar and Carr’s business as well as their book. It refers to the Amazon creed: don’t create a product and then try to sell it; start with the customer experience then work backwards to the design and marketing. No Rules Rules is a stretch, for Hasting and Meyer’s book is as much about the rules Netflix does have, and how they are enforced, as those it has let go.

The pictures that eventually emerge are the obverse of the ones painted by two of the companies’ best-known incidents, both involving PowerPoint. Netflix’s organisational culture began attracting attention because of the massive, 127-slide Netflix Culture Deck, first shared outside the organisation in 2009. Amazon memorably banned PowerPoint for internal presentations in 2004 after CEO Jeff Bezos and co-author Colin Bryar read Edward Tufte’s essay condemning the “cognitive style” of that ubiquitous presentation software. Complex, interconnected discussions were not well served by the relentless linearity of bullet points. In PowerPoint’s place came the “six-pager,” a short narrative format still used to “describe, review or propose just about any type of idea, process or business” at Amazon. Everyone has to write them and read them.

Working Backwards, though, exalts the universal application of procedures. No Rules Rules celebrates their elimination. The approaches have more in common than it seems, but they are undoubtedly distinctive mindsets to bring to the task of innovation and invention.

Exalting procedure, Bryar and Carr explain the “Bar Raiser” hiring process, “single-threaded teams” as an organising principle, and the PR/FAQ (Press Release/Frequently Asked Questions) process that Amazon uses for new product development. The PR/FAQ embodies the idea of “working backwards.” What would you say when the time came to launch this new product? What questions would customers ask and how would you answer them?

They also set out Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles — among them: “Leaders are owners… Leaders are right a lot… Leaders are never done learning… Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly and treat others respectfully… Leaders do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion… Leaders rise to the occasion and never settle.”

The most striking apparent contrast with Netflix comes from Amazon’s Deep Dive Leadership Principle: “Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are sceptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them.” Bryar and Carr add: “At many companies, when the senior leadership meets, they tend to focus more on big-picture, high-level strategy issues than on execution. At Amazon, it’s the opposite. Amazon leaders toil over the execution details.”

In this, founding CEO Jeff Bezos looms large. Bezos recently stepped down as CEO, his place taken by former head of Amazon Web Services, Andrew Jassy, though he remains executive chairman and Amazon’s largest shareholder. He was clearly a “nanomanager,” Hastings and Meyer’s term for the mythological CEOs who are said to be “so involved in the details of the business that their product or service becomes amazing.” Working Backwards is dense with references to Jeff: Jeff’s ideas, Jeff’s comments at meetings, Jeff’s early-morning emails after “walking the store,” Jeff’s unhappiness about this or delight about that.

Celebrating the elimination of rules, Hastings says, “We don’t emulate these top-down models, because we believe we are fastest and most innovative when employees throughout the company make and own decisions.” He is proud of the comment Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg made after shadowing him for a day: “You didn’t make one decision!” The idea is “to lead by context, not control.” The image of the organisational structure is a tree rather than a pyramid. The CEO sits “all the way down at the roots”; the decision-makers are “informed captains up at the top branches.”

An example: CEO Hastings, “at the roots,” sets the overall strategy for Netflix to make international expansion its number one priority. Ted Sarandos, chief content officer and now co-CEO, “at the trunk,” encourages his teams to take big risks with large potential wins or lessons-from-failure in those new territories: “We need to become an international learning machine.” Out on a “big branch,” vice-president of original animation, Melissa Cobb, decides the foray into children’s programming should mean a child watching Netflix in a Bangkok high-rise should not get the typical “global” mix of either local or US characters, but “a variety of TV and movie friends from around the world.” On a mid-sized branch, the director of the team acquiring preschool content, Dominique Bazay, decides Netflix’s animation needs to be high-quality, high enough “to be a hit in anime-obsessed Japan.” The manager of content acquisition in Mumbai, “on a small branch,” “in a small conference room in Mumbai,” commissions Mighty Little Bheem, spending a lot of money on a genre that has few precedents in India.

It is rarely difficult to poke fun at management books — at the language, the inconsistencies, the conviction that none of this has ever been done before, the confident assumption that lessons from one stellar organisation are applicable to all others.

Here, Bryar and Carr refer often to the virtues of “being Amazonian.” This is what happens when you exhibit one or more of the fourteen leadership principles. When things go well, it is because people are “being Amazonian,” sometimes without even realising it. When something goes wrong, invariably, someone, somewhere, was insufficiently Amazonian.

Netflix preaches candour and transparency about data inside the company, but has pioneered a radical degree of opacity about its own viewing numbers by comparison with the historical standards set by cinemas and television broadcasters. The company asserts its inclusivity but insists on “no jerks” — the kind of No Rules Rule that probably seems fair and obvious to incumbent non-jerks but which, one suspects, may hide unwritten sub-rules that mystify the excluded. There are no detailed rules about travel and expenses, but 10 per cent of claims are audited and if people are found to have infringed the one, overarching rule — “act in Netflix’s best interests” — well, “fire them and speak about the abuse openly.”

Innovation, of course, did not begin with the internet; Amazon did not invent customer-centric product development; leaders and organisations have been grappling forever with the balance between centralised “command and control” and decentralised autonomy. The people who laid the first Atlantic cable a century and a half ago, or launched the first aviation services, risked not just financial ruin but levels of personal danger some way beyond the life experience of Silicon Valley engineers running A/B tests of discounted shipping options.

Even working backwards seems to have had many parents. Just returned to Apple as an adviser in 1997, Steve Jobs told the Worldwide Developer Conference in 1997, “One of the things I’ve always found is you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody in this room and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.”

But there are two full litres of Kool-Aid here in these two books and you don’t have to drink it all to find much of it fascinating. Erin Meyer first thought the Netflix Culture Deck was “hypermasculine, excessively confrontational, and downright aggressive — perhaps a reflection of the kind of company you might expect to be constructed by an engineer with a somewhat mechanistic, rationalist view of human nature.” She accepted the invitation to take a closer look because what could not be denied was the scale of Netflix’s success. It’s “beyond unusual. It’s incredible. Clearly, something singular is happening.” Beyond unusual, yes, but perhaps not singular, because Amazon could say the same, at least about its growth.

Both pairs of authors obviously believe the recipes they reveal might be usefully applied to other organisations and situations, but they acknowledge limits, even in their own. They talk about failures, like Amazon’s 2014–15 Fire Phone, as well as successes. Hastings admits some people will take advantage of the absence of rules. Netflix staff probably fly business class more often than is really needed to “serve Netflix’s best interests” by arriving fresher for meetings. But “even if your employees spend a little more when you give them freedom, the cost is still less than having a workplace where they can’t fly… If you limit their choices, you’ll lose out on the speed and flexibility that comes from a low-rule environment.” The biggest risk for Netflix “isn’t making a mistake or losing consistency; it’s failing to attract top talent, to invent new products, or to change direction quickly when the environment shifts.”

No Rules Rules concludes with a frank acknowledgement of the continuing relevance of the “rules with process” model for some organisations and activities (even parts of Netflix itself), and a set of questions to ask in order to select the right approach. “If you’re leading an emergency room, testing airplanes, managing a coal mine, or delivering just-in-time medication to senior citizens,” “rules with process is the way to go.” Erin Meyer has worked with a few old economy stalwarts that might qualify, like ExxonMobil, Michelin and Johnson & Johnson, as well as with financial institutions like BNP Paribas and Deutsche Bank, whose stumbles during the global financial crisis showed how difficult it is to draw neat boundaries around the innovative, fail-fast parts of many organisations and the mission-critical operations where mistakes matter.

The large omission from both books is any real sense of the relationship between these two huge and influential organisations and the wider world. This may seem an unreasonable demand for books of this kind. But there is a clue at the start of the movie awarded Best Film at this year’s Academy Awards, Nomadland: those opening scenes of the Amazon “fulfilment centre” in the snow, juxtaposing warm, high-tech efficiency inside with the human desolation outside. We do need to insist on large questions being posed about “America,” its Tech Boom and its patchwork prosperity, the “sort of affluent dysfunction” that Janan Ganesh described recently in the Financial Times.

Bryar and Carr mention this at the outset: “Some take issue with Amazon’s impact on the business world and even on our society as a whole.” Although “obviously important, both because they affect the lives of people and communities and because, increasingly, failure to address them can have a serious reputational and financial impact on a company,” these issues are “beyond the scope of what we can cover in-depth in this book.” Relentless about the detail of so many aspects of its products, Amazon has been playing catch-up on matters as big as the living and working conditions of its people and the environmental footprint of its activities. The Working Backwards authors footnote Jeff Bezos’s April 2020 letter to shareholders, which “did address Amazon’s impact on multiple fronts.”

The Netflix that Hastings and Meyer portray is a remarkable island of “stunning colleagues,” candour and flexibility. It aspires to be a professional sports team rather than a family. People stay as long as they are the best available for their roles and are moved on as soon as they are not.

Early in No Rules Rules, Hastings tells the story of Netflix’s survival through the Tech Wreck — the dot-com crash — a “road to Damascus experience” that founded “much that has led to Netflix’s success.” The company had to let forty of its 120 staff go. It was gruelling but the company prospered. Business grew and the smaller, now more densely talented team worked longer hours and got the job done. “Talented people,” says Hastings, “make one another more effective.” “Talent density” became a Netflix lodestar.

I found myself wanting to know more about those forty people, good people apparently, just not good enough: “A few were exceptionally gifted and high performing but also complainers or pessimists.” Maybe they found other roles elsewhere for which they were better suited. They are no longer on Netflix’s balance sheet but they are probably still on the United States’. If we are to fully grasp the impact of these tech giants on the whole world, not just their own, we need to understand more than the winners. •

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The partisanship surrounding the program — ridiculous and nasty attacks from the Australian, social media defensiveness and boosterism from the Four Corners team — makes it hard to have a nuanced discussion about the allegations and the journalism. Nevertheless, here is an attempt.

The program bore an outsized weight of expectation, largely because ABC management delayed its airing (something I have written about elsewhere). In the event, it contained little information that hadn’t already been published by Crikey and the Guardian; but it was a great example of how a well-crafted piece of television — moderate and sombre in tone — can clarify and elevate the significance of a story, in this case through the power of the Stewart family’s testimony.

But let’s be clear about what it did not do. It did not prove that Scott Morrison buys into or subscribes to QAnon’s ugly and dangerous set of conspiracy theories. It provided circumstantial evidence to suggest that he might have been led by Stewart’s influence to insert a phrase in an important speech in October 2018, but it didn’t prove this. And nor did it offer evidence that Morrison has been otherwise influenced by QAnon.

The program included a one-paragraph response from the prime minister’s office declaring that Four Corners was engaged in a “personally motivated slur against the prime minister and his family” and was giving credence to “irrational Twitter conspiracy theorists.” As a result, the program was “raising the profile of what the prime minister clearly deems a discredited and dangerous fringe group.”

I think the prime minister is kidding himself if he thinks that this is an adequate response. But there are certainly murky Twitter and internet undercurrents in this story, and it is easy to see why the prime minister might choose to focus on this aspect in his defence.

The strongest evidence that Tim Stewart influenced Scott Morrison’s October 2018 apology to the survivors of sexual abuse is contained in a series of Signal messages allegedly received by Eliahi Priest, a self-styled “Australian activist and whistleblower.” All the journalists who have reported on the Stewart–Morrison friendship have used Priest as a source.

A superficial scan of his associations, history and social media activity reveals he is the kind of source journalists normally treat with great scepticism. He is an eccentric man, contemptuous of QAnon but pushing barrows of his own.

On Monday night he released a statement on Twitter, backed up by a statutory declaration, giving his own account of his interactions with Tim Stewart. He says that Stewart contacted him on Signal in September 2018 and the pair then collaborated on Priest’s attempt to bring prime ministerial attention to a theory he has about activities of the Nugan Hand Bank, which collapsed amid scandal in 1980. It had nothing to do with QAnon.

Notably, no journalists have so far picked up Priest’s Nugan Hand allegations, or many of his other claims, or even referred to this aspect of his activities. And you can see why.

Stewart and Priest subsequently fell out, and each of them effectively describes the other as a liar.

So why have journalists accepted the authenticity of the messages Priest says he got from Stewart about Scott Morrison’s speech? Could we have another Godwin Grech–style fabricator on our hands?

The Guardian, which was the first mainstream outlet to report the fact of the Stewart–Morrison friendship, clearly had reservations about Priest as a source, as can be seen from its 2019 story. While it reported Priest’s allegation that Stewart had claimed to be passing information to the prime minister, it also said “there is no evidence to substantiate Priest’s claims.”

Crikey and Four Corners concluded differently. Both basically accepted that Stewart’s messages to Priest were genuine — on the basis, as I understand it, of corroborating evidence on public Twitter streams and from other people who’d received similar material from Stewart. This matrix of evidence convinced them that the messages Priest provided were genuine.

Fair enough. But how did the messages become known to journalists? This intriguing aspect of the story was born on Twitter, when journalists Sandi Keane* and Ronni Salt — both of whom write for Michael West Media — obtained the message trail from Priest. Keane wrote on Twitter on Monday evening that “Priest kindly agreed to photograph all the critical Signal evidence over an 18 month period to Oct 2018 and send to me which I published on dozens of Tweets in Oct 2019 then sent to [Crikey journalist] Hardaker, [senator] Penny Wong, Shanks, ABC, etc. Took him a whole w/e. My job was to get it out!”

Keane also alleges that inserting the words “ritual sexual abuse” into the speech was suggested by Fiona Barnett, a woman whose claims of being the victim of an elite paedophile ring including former prime ministers were published in 2015 by most mainstream media outlets, only to be debunked by ABC’s Media Watch. Notably, Barnett is said by Keane to have been the source of allegations about paedophiles and sex crimes made by former Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan, also in 2015.

Murky stuff. But back to Stewart and his correspondence with Priest. Assuming the messages are genuine, what do they actually prove?

Only that Tim Stewart — as well as being a QAnon conspiracist — was a boaster and big-noter about his friendship with Morrison. And that is where it would rest if not for the unassailable fact that Scott Morrison did, strangely, include the phrase “ritual sexual abuse” in his speech.

A coincidence, perhaps? As evidence of QAnon influence, it’s thin. Nevertheless this alone makes the journalism worth doing, and the questions Scott Morrison has so far refused to answer worth asking.

The prime minister says he got the phrase from abuse survivors in the lead-up to his speech, including from members of a reference group associated with the royal commission into institutional child sexual abuse. Four Corners and other reporters have spoken to members of the reference group, and don’t regard Morrison’s claim as credible.

What we do know as a result of all this journalism is, first, that Tim Stewart and his wife are longstanding and close friends of the Morrison family and that Tim’s wife, Lynelle Stewart, was employed on the taxpayer dollar at Kirribilli House. Whether the friendship continues is not clear, but Four Corners showed photos of the Stewarts at Kirribilli House dating from January 2019.

There was a suggestion — short of an actual allegation — that Morrison’s controversial Hawaiian holiday in the black summer of 2019–20 would have been with the Stewarts had it not been cut short by the need for him to fly home to respond to the bushfire emergency. (News.com.au has reported that Morrison says he hadn’t planned to holiday with the Stewarts, despite both couples flying to Hawaii at about the same time.)

Second, Tim Stewart and his son are deep down the QAnon rabbit hole, and have become key figures in promoting the dangerous cult in Australia and worldwide.

Third, Stewart widely boasted about his friendship with the Morrisons and talked up his claimed influence over the prime minister.

On their own, these facts mean that journalists are right to report on this prime ministerial friendship, and to ask questions about it.

Finally, there is circumstantial evidence that Stewart might have succeeded in getting that key phrase into an important prime ministerial speech.

This final point is not proven, but the evidence is sufficient justification for the journalism, including by Four Corners.

Scott Morrison should answer the questions that arise from all this. If he doesn’t, we can only wonder why. We might speculate that the phrase was put into his head, without his realising its significance; after all, plenty of people hadn’t heard of QAnon in 2018. Or could it be that a full answer to the questions would put the spotlight on Jenny Morrison?

One final point. The Four Corners team, in my view, do themselves no favours with their social media activity. The story I have sketched above should demonstrate the importance of distinguishing between social media allegations by interested parties and professional journalism.

In that context, journalists on social media should behave with more than usual decorum. Instead, Four Corners team members take on critics, retweet supporters and implicitly congratulate themselves. Most of the time a dignified silence would be better, and even more so when the ABC is being accused of bias and is in a pitched battle with elements of the government.

Four Corners’s journalism was legitimate. It should speak for itself. And Scott Morrison should answer the questions. •

* Declaration: Sandi Keane studied for a Master of Journalism at the University of Melbourne when I was the coordinator of the course.

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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To these basic errors of human evolution, computer scientist and author Cal Newport would now add the invention of email. Our lives, he argues, have been made wretched by this brilliant technological innovation.

In his new book, A World Without Email, Newport makes a strong case against this pervasive method of communication. We live in servitude to our email servers, he says: always reachable by anyone, all the bloody time. At the heart of this digital catastrophe is something he dubs “the hyperactive hive mind,” the new reality in which everyone, everywhere, can communicate with everyone else with ease — and so they do.

Numerous studies have shown how dominant email has become in ordinary office life. The average knowledge worker sends and receives 126 of the things every working day. In an eight-hour day, that’s more than one every four minutes. Ping. Ping. PING!

“There’s something uniquely deranging about digital messaging,” Newport argues. “We depend on email, but we also kind of hate it.” It renders office workers less productive and more irritable, creating a debilitating scarcity of uninterrupted time. Those essential parts of the day when the real work gets done have been invaded by streams of customer satisfaction surveys, announcements of new training modules, and badly written email chains from colleagues in far-off time zones.

All of this might be bearable if it weren’t for one little problem: the incompatibility between modern-day electronic messaging and our own information-processing capacity. As Newport puts it, “Our brains were never designed to maintain parallel tracks of attention.” Multitasking, he says, is a dangerous myth. Our prefrontal cortex just ain’t up to the dual challenge of thinking coherently while dealing with an overloaded inbox.

We also thrive on conversations held in synchronous time. In other words, we like meetings where we get updated about the project we’re working on at the same time as everyone else. “Meetings, bloody meetings” may have been the collective moan of the pre-email age, but it was better than our fellow workers responding tardily to no-longer-urgent requests.

For most of human history we lived in small groups in which, Newport says, we felt anxious if we didn’t talk to everyone else in the tribe at least once a day. Now we live in massive digital villages, and our atavistic desire to make and maintain connection means we have conniptions if we don’t answer every damned email.

Our social anxieties about communication have also created what Newport calls a “cycle of responsiveness.” We quickly learn that the etiquette of the digital world means always being available online, no matter how grumpy it makes us. Before we can say “sleep deprivation is death,” we’re sharing our bed with a smartphone.

Despite his book’s title, Newport isn’t against electronic messaging as such; what drives him to despair is how we use it. Having got office workers of the world nodding in furious agreement, Newport courageously offers some solutions.

In 2017 a German entrepreneur named Lasse Rheingans invented the No Email Working Day. Productivity went up, even though he allowed his workers to arrive at 8am and leave by one in the afternoon. “Rheingans’ goal was for everyone to slow down,” writes Newport. “To approach their work more deliberately and with less frantic action.” Emailing is often just a hollow masquerade of real labour.

Newport also wants companies to use software packages that allow projects to be undertaken without giving everyone involved carte blanche to email everyone else in an unstructured, time-wasting manner. An applications called Trello, for example, allows organisations to work on projects without using email at all; everyone in the team can access the necessary data and decide when they need to jump in and get things done.

Autonomy at work is one of life’s greatest satisfactions. Dealing with email when it’s out of your control is a lot like being pecked to death by a flock of geese. But like a lot of bad things in modern life — the third glass of wine, the overuse of Uber Eats — it will be hard to vanquish.

In the end, I think, Newport underplays the barriers to change. What he calls Attention Capital — the ability to think without interruption — is in constant tension with the Dopamine Economy. Somewhere in Palo Alto, frazzled, email-tormented workers spend long, exhausting days trying to make staying online as addictive as possible for all their miserable counterparts by tapping into those parts of our ancient brains that derive pleasure from constant stimulation. •

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Then the Australians went off-script. Just a few days after the European Commission opted to accept Google’s reassurances and let the acquisition go ahead, ACCC chair Rod Sims stunned observers by announcing that he considered the search giant’s commitments, including a ten-year moratorium on using Fitbit’s health data, impossible to enforce. The acquisition, said Sims, “may result in Google becoming the default provider of wearable operating systems for non-Apple devices and give it the ability to be a gatekeeper for wearables data.”

Australia’s decision to go its own way on a global deal of this size was stunning. Sims conceded that Australia was a smaller jurisdiction and that a “relatively small percentage of Fitbit and Google’s business takes place here.” But, he added, the ACCC “must reach its own view in relation to the proposed acquisition given the importance of both companies to commerce in Australia.”

It was yet another reminder to the world that Australia is developing one of the toughest digital-platforms regulatory systems in the Western world. Whether it’s the bargaining code that will force Facebook and Google to pay for media content, or the three lawsuits targeting the same platforms over alleged consumer-law violations, or the detailed antitrust probes bubbling away behind the scenes, the ACCC appears to be setting standards unmatched anywhere else.

The likelihood that the muscular stance of a distant regulator will ultimately stop Facebook and Google from achieving their goals is debatable. On 14 January Google signalled it had paid no heed to the ACCC’s objections and was ploughing ahead with an acquisition that, in time, will see it use valuable and sensitive health-related data to target advertising at anyone with a Fitbit device.

This leaves the ACCC to pursue a competition probe rather than an acquisition review, which suggests that we might next hear about the dispute when Sims announces a lawsuit in the Federal Court of Australia. But even if the court were to support Sims’s decision to oppose the merger, the deal would still be done and dusted, raising the prospect that Australia may have to be excised from the global acquisition — an unpalatable prospect for Google.

Australia’s forceful regulation of Big Tech has sparked intense interest in Brussels, where the European Commission has imposed hefty fines over the past ten years but made no headway in its key concern that the platforms’ accumulation of data is steadily eroding competition. The Europeans view the Australian push with a mix of admiration, scepticism and professional envy. Some Brussels insiders fear that the ACCC’s bold experiment highlights their own limitations and would like to see the outspoken Sims cut down to size. This may yet happen, with the Australian regulator facing the very real prospect that the Federal Court will overturn any attempt to stand in Google’s way.

For its part, the ACCC believes, rightly or wrongly, that its recent world-first Digital Platforms Inquiry gave it an unrivalled insight into Facebook’s and Google’s business models. That expertise is now percolating through the ACCC’s reviews of global deals that have an Australian component — be it Google’s acquisition of Fitbit or Facebook’s equally problematic acquisition of Giphy, a gif database. The inquiry has left the ACCC with what it considers a solid understanding of how the tech giants’ acquisitions pose a risk to competition.

At the heart of the Digital Platforms Inquiry’s final report was the conclusion that the platforms already derive ample market power from their unrivalled accumulation of data. While there’s no evidence yet that Facebook and Google have already abused their market power, the ACCC believes the risk is real.

In the case of Fitbit, the Australian regulator didn’t appear concerned about the hardware component — so what if Google owned a company making watches? What raised red flags was the fate of the trove of health data, past and future, that could force other players out of the market and deter new ones from entering. The ACCC certainly worries about privacy and consumer law — using sensitive data to target advertising is ethically and legally fraught — but its biggest fear is that the tech giants could dramatically limit competition.

This goes some way to explaining why, in June last year, the ACCC led the world once more in announcing an investigation into Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy. Again, the fact that Facebook would want to own a company that hosts the short bits of video and animated stickers known as gifs is neither here nor there. But Facebook’s control and accumulation of data — in this case, data potentially acquired from rivals through Trojan-horse-like, embedded gifs — was something the ACCC was never going to accept uncritically. British and Austrian regulators have followed suit, with Brazil’s competition watchdog also pondering whether to investigate.

Google’s acquisition of Fitbit also raises another global issue on which the ACCC is less of an outlier: what are known as behavioural undertakings. It’s true that the European Commission expressed similar concerns about Google’s control of Fitbit data as its Australian counterparts, but the Brussels antitrust officials ultimately accepted Google’s legally enforceable undertakings — namely, the ten-year freeze on using data collected through Fitbit devices for advertising and a pledge not to use its Android operating system to “discriminate against wrist-worn wearable devices… by withholding, denying or delaying their access to functionalities of Android.”

It’s not unusual for regulators to allow deals to proceed subject to conditions like these. But Sims has repeatedly resisted approving deals that involve companies committing themselves to behave in certain ways. His view is that you can’t believe a word said by board members planning a merger — they will promise anything to get a deal across the line.

In the case of Big Tech, Sims’s recalcitrance appears justified. In 2014, the European Commission allowed Facebook to acquire messaging service WhatsApp after the company assured the regulator that combining its user information with WhatsApp’s was impossible. Facebook then went ahead and did just that, prompting the European Commission to impose a penalty of €110 million — a substantial fine, but still well within the cost of doing business for a company reaping the benefits of consolidating two lucrative datasets.

The ACCC argues that only structural remedies — ownership arrangements and asset sales — should be taken seriously. It isn’t alone, with the acting head of the US Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter, recently describing the Europeans’ willingness to accept behavioural remedies as an important point of difference with US regulators. She would sooner go straight to courts than accept a complex behavioural undertaking, she added.

The problem for the ACCC is that its scepticism about Big Tech’s promises doesn’t appear to be shared by the judges who have the final say over whether the regulator can block a merger. With no significant deal involving tech companies having yet made it to court, the Fitbit or Giphy deal could be the first case of its kind to be examined by the Federal Court.

On that score, the ACCC’s recent defeat in a case involving Pacific National’s acquisition of the Acacia Ridge terminal, a key piece of rail infrastructure in Queensland, was a painful reminder that courts are happy with legally enshrined undertakings. After two defeats in the Federal Court, the ACCC took the Acacia Ridge case to the High Court, only to have the court refuse to hear the appeal.

But is a merger case involving rail infrastructure likely to resonate in a debate over data dominance? Remarkably, yes. The ACCC’s objection to Pacific National’s acquisition was that it would allow the company to hinder its rivals’ access to the only connection between Queensland’s narrow-gauge railway network and the standard gauge of other Australian states.

The ACCC hammered the same point in the final report of its Digital Platforms Inquiry. If Amazon, Facebook and Google control access to their platforms, and if the services they own are competing against other companies using those platforms, then they have the ability and the incentive to hinder the operations of companies they don’t own. The owner of the pipeline can’t also own the company competing for the right to use that pipeline.

All this means that the ACCC would be facing an uphill battle if Google’s promise to behave itself were to end up in an Australian court. Google would argue that its legally binding commitments sweep aside the regulator’s competition concerns; the court, whose judges regularly deal with the enforcement of less monumental contracts, might well agree.

A high-profile defeat for the ACCC would reverberate around the world, harming the credibility of its digital regulatory regime and feeding the schadenfreude of European regulators who have found themselves lagging behind their Australian counterparts. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Australia goes it alone appeared first on Inside Story.

Lina Khan, a Columbia Law School professor, has been nominated to join the five-member board of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the two key US agencies responsible for preventing businesses from acquiring and abusing monopoly power. Even before she finished her law degree, Khan was a high-profile critic of the antitrust enforcement machine. An article she wrote for the Yale Law Review questioning the risks of Amazon’s ever-growing reach went viral and led to a surge of interest in the strategies the big tech platforms were using to supercharge their dominance.

Tim Wu, also a professor at Columbia Law School, will join Biden’s National Economic Council as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy. In 2019, he published an (appropriately) small but powerful book, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, drawing parallels between the tech platforms and the powerful oil and steel barons of the late nineteenth century. Antitrust laws, he argued, had failed to protect American consumers and society from their dominance.

Given the hipsters’ concerns about the power of big tech, these appointments have been seen as a shot across the bows of the FAANGs — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. Biden signalled during the election campaign that he would be open to breaking up these companies, and Wu and Khan have indicated they believe the government should be more willing to use its divestment powers, last used to break up the national AT&T telephone network in the 1980s.

But carving up the tech businesses without damaging their offer to consumers isn’t straightforward. All of the FAANGs rely to some degree on “network effects,” whereby consumers derive benefits from the fact that many other consumers or businesses are on the platform offering them the products, apps or services they are looking for. The easiest option would be to require FAANGs to divest the formerly competing businesses they have acquired in recent years, such as Facebook’s WhatsApp and Instagram, and Google’s YouTube.

Breaking up the tech companies’ core businesses would be highly complex. The regulator would need to prove in court that they had breached anti-monopoly laws and the court would need to force a break-up. The slow pace of complex antitrust litigation and the inevitable appeals could stretch out this process for a decade or more.

But the government and regulators can wage the battle of big tech market power on many other fronts. They could be far more active in preventing the big guys from buying emerging competitors (a preferred strategy of Facebook and Google). They could introduce restrictions on the tech companies competing with the businesses that use their platform to sell their products (Amazon and Google). And they could restrict the companies’ use of their growing trove of consumer data.

Because the United States is the home of the tech companies, actions taken there will have implications for consumers and businesses the world over. But the appointment of Wu and Khan also has implications beyond tech. Both are ardent critics of market power in all its forms.

Their main critique of antitrust policy is that its narrow focus on prices and consumer welfare has missed many of the real dangers of market power — harm to workers and small businesses, rising inequality and, ultimately, a threat to democracy itself. As Wu writes, “The broad tenor of antitrust enforcement should be animated by a concern that too much concentrated economic power will translate into too much political power” and “thereby threaten the Constitutional structure.”

As radical as this may sound, Wu convincingly argues that preventing these problems was the original intention of antitrust law and the animating force behind government actions against powerful conglomerates in the early twentieth century.

Such an emphasis would put the United States on the more activist end of antitrust enforcement globally. Most other competition regulators, including our own Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, are still focused on the economic fallout from market power rather than broader political or social concerns.

It remains to be seen whether Biden’s appointments will lead to a fundamental reimagining of the antitrust paradigm or simply more active enforcement of existing laws. Either way, big tech, corporate America and the world are on notice that business as usual isn’t on the menu. •

The post Biden’s trustbusters appeared first on Inside Story.

As befits a well-executed act of bastardry, there had been no warning. The Australian government, which had been negotiating with the Silicon Valley giant over the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, was caught by surprise, as were the platform’s users. Newsrooms that had built distribution strategies around Facebook-elicited clicks scrambled to regroup.

Less than a week later, just as suddenly, Facebook was back at the negotiating table. The point had been made, and the deal with the government, when it came, did little to reduce the impact of the company’s shock-and-awe response to Australia’s landmark media code. It was a tantrum that echoed around the world — exactly as it was designed to do.

On day one of the operation, local media had been quick to conclude that Facebook’s plan had backfired. The list of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire was indeed impressive: community groups, the WWF and its save-the-koala campaign, the Bureau of Meteorology, ABC Kids, health authorities and, of course, the now much-derided North Shore Mums group.

For the Australian media, Facebook had reminded the world not only of its power but also of its scattergun approach to moderation, with the platform seemingly unable to differentiate between the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Local Health District. The void left by news would be filled by anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists and whatever charlatan Facebook’s algorithm coughs up on any given day.

But the political ruckus was a small price to pay for the message that was sent to other jurisdictions around the world — Canada, Britain, India and France — where similar regulatory moves are being countenanced. At the drop of a hat, Facebook has the power to cut loose the local media businesses that have come to rely on the platform to distribute their content. News needs Facebook more than Facebook needs news.

Local media had every right to take umbrage — after all, the legislation to enshrine the media code hadn’t even been passed. What made it even more unexpected was the fact that Google, the other target of the proposed legislation, had started to play ball with both Australian and international publishers in a bid to avoid being forced to a negotiating table overseen by an independent arbitrator — a nightmare prospect for a big tech company.

Yet the outrage over Facebook’s Australian news purge overlooked the backdrop to the move. The News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code may well have been the boldest attempt anywhere in the world to force digital platforms to pay for journalism, but it’s not the first time Facebook has been on the receiving end of innovative regulation in Australia. Over the past few years, digital platforms have been clobbered by Australian laws and enforcement in ways that are simply unthinkable in other countries — and Facebook has been bearing the brunt of that.

Australia’s 2019 “abhorrent violent material” legislation is just one example of what the social media platform has had to endure. Under the law, Australian-based Facebook employees could be jailed for up to three years if the company fails to remove designated violent content in an “expeditious” manner. Facebook’s Australian boss, Will Easton, is reportedly not involved with the company’s local strategy, which is being guided by head office, yet he could still wind up behind bars if live-streamed content, such as the 2019 mass shootings in Christchurch, isn’t removed quickly enough to satisfy the vague wording of the legislation. Nobody accepting a job with Facebook’s Australian business would be unaware of what they are signing up to and no democratic country has comparable legislation in place.

This also suggests that Australian laws targeting platforms are part of a more complex global mosaic. In the United States, judges at both state and federal level already have Facebook in a headlock, with myriad allegations that the tech giant has violated antitrust or privacy laws. French lawmakers are pursuing objectives similar to those of Australia’s media code, albeit using copyright law; India is pushing back on the use of Facebook’s WhatsApp; and the European Commission, the EU’s regulator, has unfinished business with Facebook over its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp.

Facebook knows that regulation is catching up with it, and it knows that Australia’s efforts to tamper with its business model had to be shut down quickly and ostentatiously, before other jurisdictions followed suit. The North Shore Mums got themselves caught up in what may prove to be the most significant regulatory tangle of the century.

If turnout is an indicator of success for a press conference, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s 16 December effort was a flop. There was just one journalist in the house — a Sydney-based colleague of mine — to hear ACCC chairman Rod Sims announce a court action against Facebook, Facebook Israel and a Facebook-owned company called Onavo. Yet Sims’s words that day attracted the attention of business editors, and reports of the Federal Court of Australia lawsuit quickly bounced around the world.

The Onavo case is significant. The ACCC is tackling Facebook over data-privacy issues — something it has already done, twice, against Google, with one suit delving into what consumers did and didn’t know about Google’s Android operating system. But Australia’s 1988 privacy legislation, which is only now being overhauled, is a hopelessly inadequate tool for safeguarding the rights of people who use digital platforms. Penalties under the Privacy Act aren’t large enough to deter global tech giants, and the privacy enforcer, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, is overstretched and underfunded at the very time privacy challenges are mounting.

By contrast, Australia’s recently updated body of consumer laws — known collectively as the Australian Consumer Law, or ACL — places significant firepower and additional investigative tools in the hands of the comparatively well-resourced ACCC. Since 2018, the regulator has been able to ask courts to impose fines of up to $10 million per offence, or three times the value of the monetary benefit received by the company, or 10 per cent of the company’s global annual turnover — whichever of the three options is the largest. That 10 per cent penalty places Australia at the forefront of global privacy enforcement; even the EU’s groundbreaking General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in 2018, fixes penalties at a mere 4 per cent.

The ACCC knows that it has a lethal weapon at its disposal, and its lawsuits against Google and Facebook are likely to reveal the law’s efficacy as a deterrent. By contrast, the information commissioner has been relegated to more narrowly defined privacy cases, such as Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data breach, which saw the usually unadventurous privacy watchdog file action in the Federal Court that mirrors what is unfolding in other jurisdictions — including Canada, where an almost identical lawsuit appears to be floundering.

But pursuing what are essentially privacy cases under consumer law requires lateral thinking. For example, the ACCC isn’t arguing that Google breached the privacy of users of its Android operating system by not informing them that their phones gather information about their whereabouts even after location-tracking settings have been disabled. The ACCC will instead argue that the search giant’s failure to inform Australian consumers of its data-gathering, storing and processing was a breach of its duties under consumer law. It’s about failing to protect consumers.

Which brings us back to Onavo, the Israeli company behind a free, downloadable software application offering a virtual private network, or VPN. Facebook acquired Onavo in 2013 — a deal driven by Onavo’s access to data that is now viewed as highly controversial.

Onavo’s app, called Onavo Protect, promised its users absolute privacy — it was the app’s key selling point. But the ACCC alleges that the company was in fact hoovering up data from its mobile users, and that the data ended up under Facebook’s control. In Sims’s words, “hundreds of thousands” of Australians were affected by Facebook’s alleged actions, none of them aware that their online habits were being monitored by the owner of their privacy-focused VPN. So great was the concern over Facebook’s relationship with Onavo, says the ACCC, that Apple and Google removed the product from their app stores.

While this lawsuit is unfolding in Australia, Facebook has been targeted by twin competition lawsuits filed by the Federal Trade Commission, one of the two competition regulators in the United States, and forty-eight state attorneys-general. The platform has been accused of extending its monopoly of social media through anticompetitive acquisitions — known as “killer” acquisitions — and of devising strategies to exclude its competitors.

The Onavo documents filed in the US case are likely to make an appearance in the ACCC’s local lawsuit because they reveal what US prosecutors will argue was an early-warning system to alert Facebook to current or future threats to its monopoly. Any evidence of users flocking to a particular software, for example, could be dealt with either through a pre-emptive acquisition or by finding other ways to defuse the threat, according to the complaint filed by the US states.

The ACCC is likely to stick to the straight and narrow of Australian Consumer Law by arguing that Australian users should have been informed that Facebook was making use of their data. But the competition law elements fed in from the United States will boost the Australian regulator’s understanding of how Facebook operates — an understanding now recognised as world-class following the landmark Digital Platforms Inquiry, the eighteen-month probe that ultimately led to the formulation of the media bargaining code.

The ACCC’s developing expertise in digital markets is arguably a bigger threat to Facebook than any single piece of legislation. That knowledge is permeating the regulator’s ongoing probe of digital advertising, which is being closely monitored by lawyers working on a lawsuit, filed in Texas by ten US states, taking on both Facebook and Google over their ad-tech practices.

Meanwhile, the ACCC’s growing scepticism about Facebook acquisitions of other technology companies, which are clearly designed to gain control of vast swathes of data, is now feeding into the regulator’s review of specific deals it is examining, including Google’s move on smartwatch maker Fitbit and Facebook’s completed play for Giphy, a company specialising in GIFs.

In fact, nothing illustrates the ACCC’s fear of Facebook’s control of data better than Facebook’s completed acquisition of Giphy, which is now subject to a behind-the-scenes investigation by the watchdog. Rod Sims doesn’t seem to believe that Facebook has any real interest in GIFs of Kanye West going from a smile to a frown or Oprah giving the camera her “I told you so” look; the tech giant simply wanted to get its hands on the data that changes hands every time you download something from Giphy.

Of even greater concern to the ACCC is the fact that every time you use a Giphy GIF on a rival platform, you are embedding Facebook’s data-gathering software — a kind of digital Trojan horse. “This would be right in the middle of their systems and it would help Facebook scrape the data of their rivals to see what their rivals are doing,” Sims told me recently.

Keen observers know that Australian home affairs minister Peter Dutton unliked Facebook years before the platform decided to purge news from its Australian feed.

In December 2018, federal parliament adopted the world’s first laws targeting encrypted messaging services, which allow law-enforcement agencies to demand access to decrypted messages — in other words, to build a “back door” into international encryption standards. The law’s top two targets were Facebook’s encrypted messaging service, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Not surprisingly, Facebook pushed back — but then, so did most Silicon Valley and Australian software companies. Scott Farquhar, co-founder of the Sydney-based software giant Atlassian, said the legislation amounted to “legislative creep” and warned that rules earmarked for serious crimes and terrorism may ultimately be used to prosecute traffic offences.

Dutton bristled at the criticism and used a National Press Club of Australia speech in 2018 to accuse American tech giants of dodging taxes and complaining about assisting authorities in democracies while cosying up to dictatorships in “grown markets” — by which he presumably meant China. Two years later, Dutton returned to the theme and singled out Facebook, saying that its plans to provide end-to-end encryption for its Messenger service would create a platform for child abuse. “Facebook would not allow in their workplace the abuse of women or children and yet they provide a platform that enables perpetrators to carry out that very activity,” Dutton said, no doubt knowing that once you’ve accused your adversaries of supporting paedophiles they’re unlikely to return your calls.

For Australian police forces and spy agencies grappling with money laundering and terrorism, access to encrypted messages was an important win. They argued that a key to unlock encrypted messages is now an essential part of their investigative toolbox, just as law-enforcement agencies could tap the phones of suspects in more innocent, pre-digital times.

For Facebook, though, the encryption laws were a disaster. By building a back door into its global encryption, said the company, Australia was paving the way for global criminal syndicates that are looking for weaknesses in secure communication. “Cybersecurity experts have repeatedly proven that when you weaken any part of an encrypted system, you weaken it for everyone,” a Facebook spokesperson said when the legislation was being reviewed in 2019. “The ‘backdoor’ access you are demanding for law enforcement would be a gift to criminals, hackers and repressive regimes, creating a way for them to enter our systems and leaving every person on our platforms more vulnerable to real-life harm.”

It’s not that these arguments fell on deaf ears — it’s more that the Australian government treated them with contempt. Since the MV Tampa entered Australian waters in 2001, the country’s centre-right coalition has staked its reputation on national sovereignty — or, at least, its understanding of national sovereignty. It was never going to accept arguments that it had a global responsibility to maintain the integrity of encrypted messaging services at the expense of national priorities. It argued that its responsibility was towards the people that live within Australia’s borders; the suggestion that it couldn’t apply local regulation to technology companies doing business here was never going to fly.

The 2019 legislation on abhorrent violent content, rushed through parliament in under a week, raised the same global concerns. The Coalition government dismissed them just as quickly. Facebook argues that its global operations mean that its Australian staff can’t be held responsible for, say, a piece of extreme terrorist content uploaded in Kazakhstan by someone with no links to Australia. The prospect of local Facebook employees ending up in jail if the company failed to act quickly to remove extreme violent content was at odds with the global nature of the internet, Facebook said.

This time, it was attorney-general Christian Porter’s turn to ridicule the suggestion that the government didn’t have the right to regulate what was appearing on Australian screens. If television stations were to broadcast extreme terrorist content, they would lose their licence — why should Facebook be any different?

That debate set the tone for the Australian government’s current interactions with Facebook. In April 2019, Porter said that discussions with the tech giant had convinced him that the social media platform had “no recognition of the need for them to act urgently to protect their own users from the horror of the live streaming” of the Christchurch massacre.

What had become clear then and remains clear today is that Facebook knows it’s on a hiding to nothing in Australia. The platform has zero friends among lawmakers and is treated with outright suspicion by a competition watchdog that reckons it understands the platform’s business model better than enforcers in other parts of the world. Meanwhile, time and time again, the Australian government has pushed for policy designed to hurt Facebook while mocking suggestions that a global platform was somehow out of the reach of local laws.

If Mark Zuckerberg does eventually decide that the time has come to turn his back on Australian news, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Winning the battle, still fighting the war appeared first on Inside Story.

In the distant past, the job of communications department bureaucrats was sometimes less about coming up with innovative policy ideas and more about steaming open correspondence from media moguls before it reached the prime minister’s office. That way the public service at least got an early warning of the likely agenda.

In previous lives, Fletcher wrote and received that kind of correspondence himself. Having worked as a lawyer, corporate strategist, ministerial chief of staff, and corporate and regulatory affairs adviser and consultant, he knows all the games so well that he has little need to play them.

The shift in approach has also been motivated by a changed balance of power in Australian media and communications. The 1980s and 90s were dominated by two big voices, commercial TV and metropolitan newspapers. Telcos were there too, but on media policy they provided a distant chorus, not big solos. Now they are noisier. Add in rising new powers — the overseas-based technology and streaming giants — and governments are faced with too many vocalists to audition individually. You send out the score and let them all sing.

They all matter to media policy and politicians now. TV remains popular with older viewers, and the nightly news is still watched by a lot of voters. Mobile network operators pay big money for radiofrequency spectrum once used by broadcasters. Streaming services attract huge numbers of subscribers and the bulk of viewing time in some demographics. Google, Facebook and Amazon, by some measures, rule not just media and communications but also the world.

Arriving in the portfolio in May last year, Fletcher quickly called a halt to a process of reforming radiofrequency spectrum law that had gone on a long time without much progress. He then restarted it on a new track. Legislation is expected to make it through parliament before the end of the year.

The ACCC was already investigating the impact of online search engines, social media and digital content aggregators on competition in the media and advertising markets. Responding to its report in December last year, Fletcher and other ministers announced a “staged process to reform media regulation.” One of the first steps was to request a paper canvassing options for future regulation of local content on TV. It was released in April, amid growing broadcaster resentment about obligations they faced but their streaming video competitors did not.

In late September, Fletcher responded by announcing that current Australian and children’s content quotas for commercial TV would be replaced by a more flexible, points-based quota system, and pledging additional funding for Screen Australia and the Australian Children’s Television Foundation. In the green paper, he tackles the underlying problem of the long-term sustainability of the free-to-air industry in a world where internet streaming of TV is growing dominant.

The Covid-19 pandemic initially boosted free-to-air TV viewing but smashed advertising revenues, which fell around 15 per cent in 2019–20, increasing the already intense pressure on broadcasters’ costs. While TV audiences are rapidly moving online, the industry is stuck with the high, fixed cost of making five TV networks available to every household in Australia. Transmitters are needed at over 400 sites to do this, as is the Viewer Access Satellite TV service, or VAST, which gets signals to the more than 200,000 households beyond the reach of the terrestrial sites.

Pursuing audiences online brings further costs for broadcasters. Their streamed and on-demand services get to TV sets and other devices because broadcasters, like other video providers, pay to upload their programs to networks of distributed servers known as content delivery networks, or CDNs. Unlike the fixed costs of broadcasting, CDN costs vary with the number of simultaneous users.

Internet streaming also comes with its own gatekeepers. Australian TV networks need the ABC iView, SBS On Demand, 7plus, 9Now and 10Play apps to be “discoverable” in a crowded online landscape where they are important but hardly dominant players. Their aggregate online audiences are smaller than either of the market leaders, Netflix and YouTube, who buy colourful buttons on most TV remote controls. Apple TV+ comes pre-installed on Apple devices as well as on many smart TVs manufactured by Samsung, LG, Sony and others. “Chromecast with Google TV” is the search giant’s latest crack at conquering home entertainment. Amazon lures subscribers to Amazon Prime through premium shipping deals.

To compete with these and other global video giants, local networks must create and maintain a version of their network apps customised for every app marketplace, including every brand of TV receiver. TV manufacturers expect local broadcasters to pay for a conspicuous place, or sometimes any place at all, on the start-up menus of their “smart” TVs. Samsung has started competing with them on their own patch, launching a TV streaming service available free to all owners and purchasers of late-model Samsung smart TVs, carrying thirty channels (in Australia, that is — in the United States the figure is one hundred) including Bloomberg TV+ and Fuel TV.

The Covid recession has made the issue of broadcast TV’s high, fixed transmission costs a whole lot more pressing. This is the backdrop to Fletcher’s green paper. Governments have shown themselves prepared to spend on an extraordinary scale this year but the growing deficits have sharpened the search for savings elsewhere.

The green paper suggests that if enough TV broadcasters are interested in squeezing down to a smaller number of channels, thereby vacating some spectrum, the federal government might be willing to lighten their tax burden and tip an unspecified share of the spectrum auction proceeds their way. This is where the range of possible moves starts to get very complicated.

Broadcast television uses spectrum in the UHF and VHF bands (ultra and very high frequency) to deliver signals to aerials on roofs and inside homes. In Australia, TV spectrum is divided into five blocks, each containing six channels 7 MHz wide. One block of channels is used at every transmission site: for example, the main Sydney transmitters (feeding the tall towers on the Lower North Shore) use Block A on the chart below, the infill transmitters at Kings Cross use Block B and those at Gosford use Block D.

Each of those blocks can be reused at other places across the country, provided they are sufficiently far apart. So Block A, for example, is also used for the main stations in Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne. Transmitters at each location carry the five networks (Seven, Nine, Ten, ABC and SBS) or their non-metropolitan franchisees (such as WIN, Prime and Southern Cross Austereo). The sixth channel in each block is mostly vacant.

Australian mobile network operators want the government to encourage TV out of this band. The federal government is keen to help for two reasons. First, it funds two of the five broadcasters, the ABC and SBS, and therefore pays their TV transmission bills. These might be reduced under some scenarios.

Australia’s TV bands: The top bar shows spectrum used before digital switchover. The middle bar shows the five blocks currently used. The bottom bar represents the North American 600 MHz “second digital dividend.”

Second, it receives the revenue when vacated spectrum is sold. Between 2001 and 2017, switching TV broadcasters from analogue to digital transmission netted over $3 billion from selling the vacated “digital dividend” spectrum to the big mobile operators who now use it mainly for 4G services. Australia’s digital dividend comprised the UHF frequencies 694–806 MHz, colloquially known as the 700 MHz band. Recovering some of the spectrum still used in the 600 MHz band would represent a second digital dividend. There won’t be as much of it as the first one, but large sums are still likely to be offered.

How to pack the TV services currently carried across five blocks of frequencies into the spectrum currently occupied by only three of those blocks is a great challenge with political and social, as well as technical, dimensions.

If mobile operators are going to get the 600 MHz band spectrum they want, at least some TV services are going to have to move — somewhere, somehow, and sometime soon. We have been looking at this issue and recently explored five options in an article in the Journal of Telecommunications and the Digital Economy. The minister’s green paper implicitly looks at the first two: a “minimalist model” involving an upgrade to the existing transmission system; and a full replacement of the current transmission standard with a new, specialised broadcast platform, most likely “DVB-T2” (the enhanced version of the DVB-T system that Australia currently uses).

Each of these would improve the efficiency of transmission, although conversion to DVB-T2 would be much the bigger deal — more efficient, but also a lot more expensive. Industry has been talking about DVB-T2, even conducting a couple of trials, for years now, but it has never been clear where the money would come from.

We also considered more radical options: shifting broadcast TV entirely to online or satellite delivery, and some form of hybrid solution that combines elements of them all. We concluded that the last of these, a hybrid, is the most likely outcome.

A new or upgraded transmission standard would allow broadcasters to transmit more TV “channels” or better-quality images — HDTV instead of SD, 4K instead of HDTV, or a combination of the two. But the primary impetus for change today is not to deliver more or better TV. It is financial: to reduce the costs of transmission and enable a future change in use of the 600 MHz spectrum. That would require TV broadcasters to consolidate their capacity and cooperate to a degree that has not previously been mandated, although they have sometimes chosen to do it. This would not only change the transmission standard but also overthrow one of the historical pillars of the Australian TV industry: the ability of each licensed broadcaster to operate, or direct the operation of, its own transmitters. Radio broadcasters have already cooperated for digital radio, but TV? TV is different.

Fletcher’s green paper proposes offering commercial TV broadcasters a one-off, irrevocable chance to elect to stay with their existing licences or move to new ones. New licence holders would enjoy an immediate and permanent holiday from spectrum taxes and be subject to slightly reduced content obligations. (Commercial TV operators have been paying aggregate taxes of around $41 million per year for access to their TV channels, although these were temporarily waived this year as a Covid-19 industry support measure.)

In return, the government may require them to consolidate their services onto a single TV channel with one or more other TV networks. (This is known as “multiplex sharing,” after the device that consolidates multiple streams of TV for transmission.) The government would do so if at least two of the three commercial networks in each area elected to move to new licences. Instead of using three TV channels in each area, commercial TV would use two, or perhaps even one, with participating broadcasters entering into channel-sharing arrangements.

If enough commercial broadcasters so chose, the ABC and SBS would also be directed to move to a single, shared multiplex. Together, these consolidations would generate the necessary reduction from five multiplexes — and spectrum blocks — to the magic number, three, that would allow a US-style 600 MHz second digital dividend.

But the move to three multiplexes would almost certainly require a reduction in the current suite of free-to-air TV channels. By how much? The green paper proposes that broadcasters switch to the “new” digital compression standard (MPEG-4) that they are already using for some services, which is roughly two-thirds more efficient than the existing compression standard (MPEG-2), which has been used since digital TV was launched. The actual benefit yielded may be smaller, as broadcasters are already inserting MPEG-4 content.

So far, the upgraded compression standard has been used mainly to add services like Seven’s Racing.com and carry the HD versions of each broadcaster’s primary channel. Broadcasters have been transmitting increasing amounts of content in MPEG-4 for several years now, but full conversion has been delayed by concerns that some older TV sets won’t be compatible. But with MPEG-4 standard in most new TVs for so long, very few viewers are likely to notice the change.

For government, the current proposal would provide a very fast track to a massive spectrum sale while cutting the cost of ABC and SBS transmission. The high uptake of MPEG-4-ready TVs might suggest few viewers would face blank screens, though we’d need to make sure their TVs deal smoothly with a multiplex-sharing scenario that wasn’t on the cards when the receiver standards were written. ABC and SBS, at least, would need to cut back on the suite of channels they offer. This ground was tilled exhaustively in 2015, when previous minister Malcolm Turnbull first proposed multiplex consolidation for the two broadcasters.

If no deal is struck this time, then industry, government and viewers will still be facing the range of future options that are the subject of our article. While the green paper is right that the sustainability of local TV is in play, from a viewer standpoint the transmission cost issue is also fundamentally about inclusion — how can Australia most affordably make available a comprehensive and appropriate range of local TV services to the millions of viewers, and voters, in the vast, expensive-to-serve areas outside capital cities?

Some people, especially the many who now watch little or no broadcast television, will wonder why we are even thinking about such a complex shuffle. Isn’t this why we built a National Broadband Network that is now virtually complete? The NBN shares something significant with the broadcasting system — it’s designed to offer services to every home or business in Australia — so why not get broadcast TV out of over-the-air transmission altogether, and reallocate all its spectrum at an end-of-season, last-days-must-close, digital-dividend sale?

Shifting all broadcast TV services online would be a big, bold strike, integrating broadcasters decisively into the distribution platform that is already carrying the video streaming and sharing services and apps that are drawing such big audiences. It is not exactly the same as shifting Australian TV from wireless to a fixed-line network, the old “Negroponte Switch,” because for around 8 per cent of premises NBN is either a fixed wireless or a satellite network. Nor is the NBN the only way users access broadcast TV now that mobile broadband in Australia is so fast and cheap and all networks stream their services live. Indeed, some commentators are already suggesting that TV broadcasters’ real transmission future lies with 5G wireless.

The awkward paradox for broadcasters is that the medium viewers are turning to for more and more of their video needs is not a ready, near-term replacement for broadcast TV. With people working and entertaining themselves at home, Covid-19 lockdowns provided a test run for a big increase in online video consumption. Peak downstream network throughput on NBN’s main wholesale broadband service increased by 44 per cent between February and the last week of November during the Evening Busy Hours (8pm to midnight) and more than a quarter in Peak Business Hours.

There was some help: NBN temporarily reduced network access prices for broadband service providers, and “over-the-top” video streaming and conferencing services lowered their bit-rates. The government later announced investment to upgrade the network. How successfully an even bigger traffic shift might be handled in the future, and what it would cost broadband service providers and therefore their customers, is heavily dependent on what people will watch and when, and on future NBN access prices.

Broadcast TV — seemingly a declining asset as viewing preferences have atomised – has the great advantage of being able to absorb, seamlessly and without extra cost, those moments when everyone chooses to turn on the television. Australian governments will remember well Optus’s network meltdown when it tried to exercise its exclusive rights to transmit the 2018 FIFA World Cup finals to Australians via online streaming, a fiasco from which it was rescued by the SBS’s broadcast TV service.

These occasions can be unpredictable. British prime minister Boris Johnston’s messages to the nation in March and May 2020 were Britain’s most-watched broadcasts since the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. His 10 May broadcast about the easing of lockdowns drew an astounding 90 per cent viewing share to the seven channels that carried it. At such times, politicians don’t want viewers relying on networks that melt.

Arguably the biggest transformation embodied in a complete shift to online delivery would be the loss of broadcast television’s free-to-air accessibility. A service that is enduringly popular with older, potentially vulnerable consumers would no longer be effectively free at the point of consumption, but would depend on paying for a fixed or mobile broadband subscription. It seems unlikely that anything less than 100 per cent network availability and take-up would be politically palatable as a replacement for terrestrial TV, especially when, as Telstra’s annual Australian Digital Inclusion Index highlights, the gaps between digitally included and excluded Australians are still “substantial and widening for some groups.” During the pandemic, the Index’s authors found that older people, families without adequate internet access, and vulnerable Australians have been “especially isolated.”

The other candidate for a larger role in TV’s future is direct-to-home, or DTH, satellite delivery. This has considerable technical and economic attractions and may seem conceptually straightforward because 200,000+ households already receive TV this way from the VAST service. In practice, it would be extremely contentious with viewers and hence politicians.

While satellite DTH plays a much bigger role in TV distribution in New Zealand and many other countries, it would be costly for the many households that don’t already have a satellite dish for Foxtel (if the same satellites were used) or for all viewers (if satellites other than Foxtel’s were used). It would also require the VAST service to be re-engineered and expanded to incorporate all TV networks and accommodate the separate programming and advertising break-outs they currently deliver to discrete local service areas.

But satellite has an advantage that may ensure it remains a part of the TV transmission solution — it can serve vast, sparsely settled areas cheaply. Experiences in the very few overseas markets where terrestrial TV is shutting down suggests satellite may one day provide the final safety net.

Television in Australia has been a lot more than “broadcasting” for a long time. It is now a sprawling, overlapping amalgam of the national and commercial broadcast services that founded the medium, the subscription broadcast and narrowcast services that joined it 40 years later, and the many types of online video that are received over a variety of fixed and mobile networks. It is a hybrid. We should not be surprised if it resists efforts to put it back into a single box, the kind of “black box fallacy” that American media scholar Henry Jenkins warned about in his 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide:

Sooner or later, the argument goes, all media content is going to flow through a single black box into our living rooms (or, in the mobile scenario, through black boxes we carry around with us everywhere we go)… Part of what makes the black box concept a fallacy is that it reduces media change to technological change and strips aside the cultural levels.

Seeking to answer the questions posed in the government’s green paper, it will be important not just to solve today’s pressing problems but to try to set up for what we might want to do tomorrow or, at least, to avoid unnecessarily constraining the options.

There is much more to the green paper than just a proposal to harvest the extra efficiency of a new compression standard to repurpose some valuable spectrum. The offer to broadcasters is an opening gambit; the paper issues an invitation for any better ideas about TV’s future. It acknowledges the public policy heavy lifting done by TV in telling Australian stories and ensuring the wide availability of local news.

To help secure a more sustainable future for the local industry, it proposes that the largest Subscription Video on Demand and Ad-based Video on Demand services would be required to spend a proportion of Australian revenue on local content, and would be subject to obligations to make that content discoverable. This brings more singers to the media policy choir, including production industry unions, guilds and employer associations, and representatives of people living in non-metropolitan areas.

What happens from here? First, submissions and discussion. Then government decisions and legislation, and debate in parliament, especially the Senate. Then, if something like the green paper scheme goes ahead, TV broadcasters, market by market, will elect to take one option or another. In his current life, Paul Fletcher knows all about elections. •

Research for this story and the article it refers to was supported by the Australian Research Council through ARC DP 150100887, “Spectrum After Scarcity.”

The post Television on the line appeared first on Inside Story.

Now, in the dying days of the one-term Trump presidency, two authors — British activist and writer Laura Bates and Australian-born, US-based feminist philosopher Kate Manne — offer a different way of comprehending all that has happened in recent years. In their arrestingly titled new books, Bates and Manne switch their focus to men, or rather patriarchy and its many manifestations. These range from extreme and disturbing misogyny — “incel” Elliot Rodger’s murderous shooting spree in California in 2014 — through to the seemingly intractable everyday patterns that mean men do far less housework, for instance, than women. Inevitably, given flashpoints like Harvey Weinstein and Brett Kavanaugh, Bates and Manne sometimes cover similar ground, but their projects are also distinctive — reading one should not preclude reading the other.

Manne, building on her first and more academic book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2018), examines how male entitlement works, and explores its effects, including how women’s bodies are policed but harms against them aren’t taken seriously. As per Down Girl, Manne advances her own vocabulary and theoretical framework, with misogyny described as the “law enforcement branch” of patriarchy, and sexism its “theoretical and ideological branch.” “Himpathy,” first introduced in Down Girl to explain the pervasive but under-examined sympathy sometimes shown towards male perpetrators of sexual violence, returns in tandem with “herasure,” whereby victims and targets of misogyny are blamed for what happened to them, or ignored.

These remain useful terms, but between books Manne has also discovered intersectionality and Entitled accordingly “tackles a range of ways in which misogyny, himpathy and male entitlement work in tandem with a range of other oppressions.” Manne’s analysis of misogyny now takes in transmisogyny and misogynoir — not her own terms — and draws on more scholarship and insights from Black women, non-binary people and women of colour. The book’s strongest chapters — on bodily control and medical care — benefit most from her new intersectional approach.

Manne’s enlarged focus justifies a new book that elsewhere recycles some of the same arguments and case studies as Down Girl. It’s also pleasing to read a book by a feminist academic aimed at a wide audience. Manne moves smoothly from examples of male entitlement in pop culture to cogent analysis of anti-abortion rhetoric and legislation. She pokes holes in complicit and complacent media rhetoric about whether women are “electable” to the highest office, and research that purportedly shows men to be more stoic about pain than women. Her concluding chapter, in which she cautiously hopes for a more justly entitled future for her daughter and other girls, is sufficiently galvanising.

Yet for all its obvious strengths, Entitled is a somewhat uneven book, and some sections appear to have been written in haste. Pages and pages are dedicated to labouring an example or case study — say, the play Gas Light or the podcast series Dirty John — creating a padding effect. Elsewhere, in paying tribute to Black feminist writers like Tressie McMillan Cottom, Manne seems to assume her readership would not already be aware of this work. For a writer who skilfully scrutinises the practice of “mansplaining,” Manne doesn’t seem aware of her own occasional tendency to tip over into an adjacent explanatory style, though she does dutifully acknowledge her privilege and subjectivity.

Manne’s book is mostly focused on American examples, though the odd Australian reference — including to Julia Gillard, Alan Jones and Geoffrey Rush — pops up. By contrast, I lost count of the Australian examples in Laura Bates’s more substantial and ambitious investigation of contemporary misogyny, which makes for bracing reading. In Men Who Hate Women, Bates convincingly argues that the so-called fringe online world of the “manosphere” has a ripple effect way beyond the online subcultures of “incels” (short for involuntary celibates), pickup artists and men’s rights activists who gather on platforms like Reddit and 4chan.

Bates’s entry point is personal: as a public feminist and educator, she has been a frequent target of trolls and men’s rights activists, and subject to death threats. In recent years, she’s also noticed how some teenage boys she works with in schools have begun to sprout the rhetoric and false statistics of the manosphere. Now, in an exhaustively researched and carefully argued fashion, she joins the dots between the manosphere, the alt-right and mainstream media and politics.

Readers will be familiar with at least some examples of the mainstreaming of misogynist and sexist views — the language used by the outgoing American president being a case in point — but Bates’s skill is in drawing familiar and new material together in freshly revealing and insightful ways, including by historicising these male communities and putting them in a transnational frame. Men’s rights activists, for instance, emerged from a “devastating schism” in the men’s liberation movement in the United States, and now its most prominent organisations and spokespeople are virulently anti-feminist, retailing false statistics and claims about rates of false rape allegations and men as victims of domestic violence. In Australia, prominent men’s rights activists have been given airtime on Seven’s Sunrise and have directly influenced politics, most recently Pauline Hanson’s successful call for an inquiry into family violence. Hanson, without producing evidence, claimed women routinely lie about abuse to gain advantage in court.

The size of these online communities — some of which overlap and all of which exhibit consistent and virulent misogyny, as well as racism and homophobia — is almost impossible to estimate with “any great accuracy,” writes Bates, but she succeeds in capturing a strong sense of their outsize and real-world influence. At the same time, she refutes the standard arguments used to dismiss or minimise what is evidently a globally interconnected phenomenon. She routinely and powerfully condemns the media for reductively polarised representations of incels (for example) as either “darkly violent and misogynist” or “a mischaracterised and disadvantaged group of lonely men.” The reality, writes Bates, “is that both these stories are true,” and herein lies the value of her book.

Bates pays attention to a whole spectrum of engagements with, and effects of, the manosphere. These include young boys who venture onto online platforms looking for advice or a sense of community and are gradually radicalised; “respectable” representatives of misogynist views, such as Jordan Peterson, who create and capitalise on what has become a booming market; and the Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, who carried out the horrific Christchurch massacre in March 2019. Tarrant had links to “the troll culture of the chans, the alt-right and the manosphere,” but even more than this, argues Bates, “his entire act of hatred was planned, framed and performed within that world.”

The impact of Bates’s book is cumulative: by the end I was in no doubt that Bates had exhaustively identified and reckoned with a real and urgent problem. She wants “extremist misogyny” to be taken at least as seriously as other contemporary forms of radicalism and extremism: indeed, she contends, misogyny is typically a constitutive element, but not recognised as such because hatred against women is so normalised. I’m still mulling over some of her more specific solutions and strategies — which range from more youth social workers through to legislating online misogyny as hate speech — but it’s a credit to Bates that she offers so many of them. In the final pages, she confesses her fear about potential reactions to the book but declares it is “also an act of resistance.” Men Who Hate Women is a brave book, and it deserves a wide readership. •

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Despite promises of an economic “snapback,” it’s becoming increasingly clear that the world of work is likely to change significantly as a result of coronavirus. One of the likely shifts will be the rise of teleworking. If Covid-19 has taken us back a decade in terms of globalisation, it’s taken us forward a decade technologically. Large swathes of the workforce are working from home and the trend is likely to endure, with one US study projecting the share of working days spent at home to rise from 5 per cent to 20 per cent after the pandemic passes. Having fewer desks than employees may become the norm for white-collar firms.

One of the valuable changes will be a move away from open-plan offices, which were always more about corporate symbolism than productivity. We know from a bevy of studies that workers are more stressed, more dissatisfied and more resentful when they work in an open-plan setting. Compared with regular offices, employees in open offices experience higher levels of noise and more interruptions. They are less motivated, less creative and more likely to take sick leave.

Yet in their anxiety to save on rents and give the impression of being “collaborative,” firms pushed towards open plan regardless. Like other critics of open-plan offices, I never gave much thought to their potential to allow diseases to spread more quickly, but this may well be the clincher that shifts firms back to regular offices. If the research is to be believed, this is likely to be good for productivity.

For others, home will be the new office. People used to joke that there were three problems with working from home: the bed, the fridge and the television. But as the evidence rolls in, most of us appear less distractible than we might have feared. Certainly, working from home requires good technology (wouldn’t it be terrific if everyone already had fibre broadband, rather than trying to retrofit it?). It also helps if you’re not trying to juggle work and children. But once those conditions are met, an hour of working from home can be at least as productive as an hour in the office. In one randomised trial, employees in a Chinese firm were 13 per cent more productive working from home. During the pandemic, two-thirds of American GDP has been produced from people’s houses, and the stress levels of American workers has fallen by 10 per cent.

But remote work isn’t without its challenges. One is management quality. Great managers judge people based on their outputs and treat everyone equally. Lousy managers focus on inputs and favour their friends. This means that a major constraint on teleworking will be the quality of managers. Firms may quickly find that managers whose approach was “good enough” in 2019 won’t cut it in 2021. Organisations will struggle if they lack fair benchmarks for performance and good training systems for managers.

It doesn’t help that management training can be faddish, differing considerably across institutions and over time. If firms don’t have consistent performance appraisal systems, workers are more likely to feel that working from home is too much of a career risk. As the Economist recently put it, “the emotion that is most likely to lure workers back to the office is paranoia.”

Remote work is fine for knowledge workers, but if you’re a cleaner or a cashier it’s clearly not an option. According to a study by Harvard PhD student James Stratton, 41 per cent of Australian employees have the kind of job that lets them telework. Yet, as he notes, this simple average masks huge differences. Among low-wage employees, less than one-fifth can telework; among high-wage employees, it’s more than three-fifths. Most of those who have jobs in education or science can readily telework; hardly anyone employed in agriculture or hospitality can.

The consequences for inequality could be profound. In a recent report, MIT economists David Autor and Elisabeth Reynolds note that a rise in working from home could markedly reduce demand for cleaners, security workers, building maintenance workers, hotel workers, restaurant employees, taxi drivers and ride-sharing drivers. The pair predict that the decades-long shift towards urban densification is likely to slow or even reverse, reducing the demand for city workers.

Autor and Reynolds anticipate that a wave of mergers will cause employment to become increasingly concentrated in large firms, which tend to spend a smaller share of their earnings on workers and a larger share on managers and owners. And they forecast an increase in “automation forcing,” as Covid-related restrictions cause companies to adopt labour-saving technologies. When the pandemic is over, the economists point out, firms won’t unlearn these ideas. Retailers, cafe owners, car dealerships and meat packers will need fewer staff after the downturn than they did before.

What can government do? The starting point must be that the labour market of 2019 is not coming back. While it’s hard to forecast specific occupations, we can be sure that the demand for skilled workers will be stronger than ever. This makes it critical to ensure that disadvantaged students get the schooling they deserve. The Grattan Institute has called for intensive small-group tutoring to help a million vulnerable young people catch up to their more advantaged peers. It’s also crucial to ensure that underprivileged teens don’t drop out of school, potentially locking in a lifetime of disadvantage.

With overseas student enrolments falling for the first time in decades, Australia could expand opportunities for domestic students. Just as the early-1990s recession saw a surge in school completion, this recession is a chance to increase the university attendance rate. Why wouldn’t we create a university place for a talented young person who might otherwise be unemployed? Expanding education keeps young people engaged today, and makes them more productive tomorrow.

Crises can lead to astonishing changes. The Black Death helped usher in the Renaissance. The collapse of Chinese dynasties massively reduced inequality. The second world war paved the way for a huge expansion in Australian home ownership. The challenge today is to recognise how the recession will change the world of work, and how we can secure prosperity and equality for Australians in the decades to come. •

The post Out of the office appeared first on Inside Story.

Margaret Thatcher’s epic fall had the lot. The vertiginous week that followed Diana’s death came close. Since that 1990s peak, the pictures have got small. Brexit, Scotland, wars, elections: all have dipped well below the decade’s high bar (though the first two are having another go in extra time). Between the craving for release and the means to satisfy it there now lies an abyss, whose hallmark is the political–media spasm, or PMS. Facilitated by classical politics’ and canonical media’s submission to social media, the PMS is defined here as an unhinged, self-cannibalising public furore that debases whatever is ostensibly at issue. Not just the rotten fruit of this millennial declension, the PMS is its very avatar — as is exhibited, with fitting bathos, by Tony Abbott’s starring role in a recent production.

More dirt bucket than welcome mat, the instant local reaction to a Sun report on 25 August trumpeting the pick of “our wizard of Oz” for an undefined role promoting London’s post-Brexit trade was also impressively viperous. The ousted member for Warringah was described as a “failed Australian prime minister” (passim), “right-wing Australian anglophile” and “antipodean mercenary”; a “man of primitive opinions” and “one of the most notorious attack dingoes of Aussie politics”; “a has-been from the other side of the world of whom we know little and care less” yet also a “travelling player on the right-wing thinktank circuit” and one of a “clown parade of other fruit loops”; an “unreconstructed example of Australian chauvinist manhood”; a “walking dinosaur… defective, morally bankrupt, intellectually inadequate”; and a “strange” and “unnecessary” choice because of his antediluvian views on climate change, same-sex marriage and labour rights, and his “political gunslinging,” “inability to command loyalty” and “directionless leadership.”

Haughtiest of all, naturally from a Guardian star columnist, was Abbott’s depiction as an oddball “from the remaindered bin in Australia” who “might see his role pushing British exports as an escalating scale of rugby club dares,” and the move itself “like learning that Theresa May had accepted a part on Neighbours, possibly as some kind of Mrs Mangel reboot.” Abbott, congeniality itself in a Zoom chat with the House of Commons foreign affairs committee three days later, told a bumptious Labour MP, “I do not normally read the Guardian; I am sure it is a wonderful newspaper, but it is not my staple reading.” This didn’t get into the paper.

The prize for invective-solely-designed-to-go-viral (from a strong field) went to Labour’s shadow trade secretary Emily Thornberry, carrying the unfair advantage of five years in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet: “[A] man addicted to picking fights — confrontational, aggressive, thin-skinned and nasty,” “sexist,” “sleazy,” “Islamophobic,” an “offensive, leering, cantankerous, climate change–denying, Trump-worshipping misogynist.” Her 800-word volley began with responses from among the “host of Australian political contacts” she had texted with the news (variations on “that must be a joke,” their “uniform theme”), and ended: “[If] Tony Abbott is the best answer Boris Johnson can come up with [to Britain’s trade deal void], we’re in even more trouble than we think.”

“During his brief, two-year premiership,” those contacts had told her, “his trade minister — Andrew Robb — succeeded in translating the previous Labor government’s legwork into agreements with China, Japan and South Korea, as well as progressing Australia’s involvement in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. All Abbott did was come along at the end of the process and sign the treaties. He has no hands-on experience of trade negotiations whatsoever.”

The one–two punch — he’s a cad, and clueless on trade — was something everyone could pitch in with, from arts, environmental, LBGT+ and sporting celebrities to MPs and diplomatic veterans of the Uruguay round. London mayor Sadiq Khan (“misogynistic and homophobic views”) and Scotland’s premier Nicola Sturgeon (“He’s a misogynist, a sexist, a climate-change denier who shouldn’t be any kind of envoy”), neither of them ever slow to hitch a ride on a passing bandwagon, drew from the now ubiquitous litany, though Labour leader Keir Starmer once more proved to be a canny operator: “I have real concerns about Tony Abbott and I don’t think he’s the right person for the job. And if I was prime minister I wouldn’t appoint him.”

Abbott’s exact status was still unknown, as the man himself confirmed on 1 September at that Commons hearing: “I think I would call it a role rather than a job… there is nothing official as yet.” Responding with good humour to grandstanding darts from Labour and Scots nationalist MPs (“a bit of lively banter and partisan sparring… brings back happy memories [of] the parliamentary chamber floor”), his message, consistent with many op-eds and speeches since the 2016 Brexit vote, was that London should follow up a bilateral trade deal with Canberra by joining the interim Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

More spicy were comments on end-of-life care and lockdown’s “psychic damage” at a lecture that morning to the Policy Exchange think tank — whose chair is Alexander Downer, formerly Australia’s high commissioner in London — which showed the Guardian’s diplomatic editor “how Abbott’s courting of controversy made his possible appointment by Johnson a high political risk.”

On the other side, the cheerleading of the Sun (or “Murdoch’s Sun,” to use the correct vernacular) lacked the paper’s usual fizz, given its exclusive that the “forthright Aussie” is “to be unveiled as Britain’s new trade deal supremo” or, more formally, “joint President of Britain’s relaunched Board of Trade.” Johnson himself, as so often in these months, was absent from the front line, leaving ministers to defend the still-hazy appointment.

A mannequin could plausibly have done better. Health secretary Matt Hancock, a gung-ho crusader amid every Covid-19 setback, quailed at a Sky News presenter’s checklist of Abbott quotes. Liz Truss, the Panglossian trade secretary who doubles as minister for women and equalities, when asked “why is it right that someone who is widely viewed as sexist, homophobic and a climate-change denier should be representing Britain around the world?” replied, “What I’d say about Tony Abbott is that he’s a former prime minister of Australia. Australia is a key ally of the United Kingdom and he has done a very good job in areas like trade.”

Through this wan defence, Australian ex-diplomats had already bowled some scornful zingers. Abbott would be “a sporadic distraction, as is his wont” in any Australian–UK process, not “window dresser” but “window breaker,” former trade negotiator Tim Ward opined in the right-wing Telegraph, adding that “[given] how destabilising his very presence seems to be, it could even be viewed as a cunning ploy by Australia to rattle the other side.” Mike Rann, who preceded Downer as high commissioner, said Abbott was known for “picking a scrap with anyone,” then nailed press coverage with a sly mention of Johnson’s most hapless cabinet placeman.

A trio of ex–Australian PMs who had jousted with Abbott, now regulars in London’s media firmament and treated with the deference that status entails, also joined the fray, thickening the flavour of an Australian proxy war fought on British shores, a kind of contrived semblance — once more, the second time as bathos — of ABC’s spellbinding The Killing Season.

Beyond doubting that Abbott could actually negotiate on behalf of the UK (“awkward to say the least”), Malcolm Turnbull added little to the caustic portrait of “wrecker” Abbott in his hefty autobiography, while Kevin Rudd (“Is the UK joking?”) took another chance to assail “Bozo the Clown’s” climate and health record. “If the UK goes through with this, he will be an albatross around their neck.” Julia Gillard’s own Sky News gig was a model of message discipline, first in promoting a book, then in holding to a tight script over her viral 2012 speech, fixedly not naming its targets. (“I stand by every word but I don’t think I need to add to it. It’s not for me to work out who should be the UK trade envoy or specialist.”)

For their part, some of Abbott’s ideological confrères were initially stunned by the way that the Sun’s 250-word pebble had, Withnail & I–like, set off an avalanche by mistake. A more downbeat tone might have served them better. (“Oz reject is Brit pick,” or “Aussie ex-PM bats for Blighty” — more originals on request.) Talking to themselves, they had omitted to game-plan his character and record becoming headline news in the old country. But as the vitriol fed on itself, as per the modern PMS, a retaliatory barrage, notably male-heavy, was let loose, its gist that Abbott was being traduced and merits the post.

Lamenting “personal abuse” and “cheap caricature,” the monthly Critic’s political editor Graham Stewart saw Abbott in eminent terms: an “Anglophile former prime minister of one of Britain’s friendliest allies” and a former Rhodes scholar and monarchist on whom the Queen bestowed the Order of Australia “for his life of public service” (accolades become a mite rickety) with an effective record of “bilateral diplomacy.” Daniel Hannan, prolific evangelist for Brexit and the Anglosphere, echoed the claim (“He knows how to get ambitious trade deals done. We are lucky to have him”), as did Downer (“Tony has huge experience of navigating through the thorny bushes of trade agreements”), while the Adam Smith Institute’s Matthew Lesh said he can “provide the advice and advocacy to get deals over the final, contentious hurdles that inevitably develop at a political level.”

Lesh’s vigorous polemic conceded “some questionable comments” by Abbott “in the past,” but defended him by referring to the supportive testimony of Abbott’s sister Christine Forster and late gay friend Christopher Pearson, the “deranged hatred” of a left now “rushing for the pitchforks,” how British views of Abbott have been “twisted” by Gillard’s “out-of-context speech,” and even Peter Hartcher’s morning-after column in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Being a conservative, with traditional social views, should not disqualify someone from all positions in public life,” Lesh argued.

That same day, 4 September, former Abbott adviser Terry Barnes published an eerily similar piece (a “flawed” man who “has said unwise, even stupid, things in the past — who hasn’t?”… whose image is “framed by his political enemies”… “vicious caricature”… “a skilled negotiator who can reconcile competing interests”… “nobody remembers the context of that fiery speech”…).

The PMS, imperious offspring of the pre-internet era’s “media circus,” is happiest in a vacuum. Information tends to get in its way. By now this one had lasted for nine days without a single new fact. Equally familiar was this PMS’s pattern: an ogre, affixed with twittified bio and shaming quotes, becomes the pretext for cartoonish, self-inflatable sloganeering that not only elicits an imitative defence but also shapes even the less reductive outpouring. The only thing in doubt was how it would exhaust itself.

Whispers of another backflip, a motif of Johnson’s premiership, began to spread. But on 4 September, with Julia’s Sky interview also doing the rounds and another weekend’s torrid headlines in sight, a hard-hatted Boris, asked where Tony stood in light of the row, delivered a typically writhing answer: “There’s going to be an announcement about the composition of the board of trade. I obviously don’t agree with those sentiments at all, but then I don’t agree with everyone who serves the government in an unpaid capacity on hundreds of boards across the country. And I can’t be expected to do so. What I would say about Tony Abbott is this is a guy who was elected by the people of the great liberal-democratic nation of Australia. It’s an amazing country, it’s a freedom-loving country, it’s a liberal country. There you go, I think that speaks for itself.”

By late afternoon, it was official: “the Honourable Tony Abbott” would be one of nine advisers to the board of trade, just as the Nine group’s Bevan Shields had intimated on day one, channelling an evidently impeccable source. (Abbott will serve in “some sort of advisory capacity,” he had posted.) The board, one of eleven committees tasked with refuelling UK strategy in key policy areas, includes Patricia Hewitt, the Canberra-born former trade secretary in Tony Blair’s government, Linda Yueh, economist and broadcaster, and investment banker William Russell, also mayor of London’s financial district as well as a member of the previous board suspended in July. That Russell functions as a friend of China’s establishment, with the ineluctable tangles the position now involves, raised zero interest amid the PMS.

That, for the present, was that. Now, between quarterly meetings with new colleagues, Abbott can get down to the work — unpaid, expenses aside, and scarcely glamorous — of “[engaging] extensively with industry, communities, farmers and consumer groups across the UK, to ensure a range of voices are heard as the UK develops its independent trade policy.” As he customises this bland spec, Zoom-networking an Australia–East Asia–UK triangle, progress will also depend on Brexit’s endgame with the European Union (in short: a trade deal or not?), and even on how Britain’s stew of economic and political uncertainties, not least the course of Boris Johnson’s government, plays out. Among these, a “growing Tory love for Australia,” albeit tendentious and needy, is cohesive for the party, with Abbott himself the emblem. It’s not you, it’s us, might well be the unspoken declaration.

More tasty are incipient signs of a roving commission for Abbott. The Financial Times reports this week that home secretary Priti Patel’s pondering the idea of sending far afield the migrants (Iranian, Afghan, Sudanese and more) who crossed the English Channel on small vessels “is further evidence of the influence of Tony Abbott’s ideas on Boris Johnson’s government.” Ascension Island in the south Atlantic was one candidate, Shetland in the North Sea another. (This chimera jolted recall of an observation by the CIA’s Frank G. Wisner in 1949, regarding the doomed Anglo-American venture to oust Albania’s communist regime, as recounted by the KGB spy Kim Philby: “Whenever we want to subvert any place, we find the British own an island within easy reach.”)

Here is the second potential seed of the next Abbott spasm, the first being the fintech entrepreneur Anne Boden’s barbed declaration of pride when her own trade board membership became known: “[It] is important that we have challenging voices at such an important body. I support diversity and so did this woman,” linking to Julia Gillard’s famous speech.

The PMS was wilting from the moment of Johnson’s interview, though the Guardian’s autopump turned Friday’s front-page lead “Pressure on PM to drop ‘misogynist’ trade adviser” into Saturday’s “PM appoints ‘misogynist’ Abbott as trade adviser.” By then the next spasm was being given lift-off by Extinction Rebellion’s two-week protest carnival, as the eco-activists’ blockage of roads and newspaper deliveries, plus its mounting of a Titanic-themed posh tea party and a model lighthouse named Greta Thunberg, incited the gamut of reaction from fury to ridicule.

Abbott fever left no trace. That may have owed a little to the swift handover to Extinction Rebellion. But two factors are more fundamental (and also fit XR, Dominic Cummings’s lockdown trip, and Black Lives Matter in its local variant). First, the PMS exists in an eternal present, absorbing into itself all other temporalities. In a flash, it dominates. Once popped, it vanishes. Thanks to a first in human history — the melding of instant amnesia and instant retrievability — it is also ever available for an encore. When that hits, and the manic carousel is unblushingly reprised, there is no sense of a previous iteration, since everything now belongs to the new eternal present.

Second, the PMS is always primarily about itself, reducing to effluent its notional subject and putative ethical concerns. Driven way beyond its natural life or level by value-spawning attention, clicks and noise, it operates to disallow any resolution or release. It can never offset the vast resources it devours and the coercive hyperbole of its language. Thus the PMS is a guarantor of disappointment.

From the consumer side, to accept the PMS on its own terms would be to overlook its many foreclosures. An oblivious British public was given no hint that Abbott himself, if unlikely ever to be stuck with the most plangent judgement in The Killing Season’s four hours — Jenny Macklin’s “people are complex” — might be viewed in other than Manichean terms. Neither his own capsule self-portrait in response to David Marr’s Political Animal — “a more nuanced and complex character than perhaps many of the standard left-leaning critics would concede” — nor the book itself, nor anything else from the Abbott oeuvre, got a look-in. The PMS can’t accommodate nuance, complexity — or curiosity.

Neither did themes pertinent to Abbott’s heralded job receive much attention during the PMS: the contours of an Australia–UK trade negotiation, the tenability of the Anglosphere, and the wider Tory infatuation with down under (Isaac Levido’s key strategic role in Number 10 as but one example) — or even the fate of its Labour counterpart. The British Foreign Policy Group’s Sophie Gaston, viewing “today’s antipodean dalliance” in equable terms (“something feels unique about the Australian influence in British politics in 2020”), was an exception.

The political–media spasm can well afford to ignore such laments. The now-unguarded public realm, beneficiary of and in thrall to social media’s flattening of silos, is its playpen. No wonder the great national drama — as music hall to film, or silents to talkies — could not survive. What the PMS can offer in place is less than clear. But when so many are happy to play Bozo the Clown, perhaps that hardly matters. •

The post Captain Abbott’s pick appeared first on Inside Story.

Even more striking is the ratio of Apple’s share price to the book value of assets. Most of the time, the market value of a company is about equal to the value of its physical capital, so that the price-to-book ratio is close to one. For Apple, the ratio is a startling twenty-seven to one.

Much the same story can be told about other leading tech stocks. Along with Apple, Alphabet (owner of Google), Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft account for around 20 per cent of the total value of the S&P 500 Index. They have price-to-book ratios ranging from five (Google) to twenty (Amazon).

The difference between the book value of physical assets and the stock price is commonly explained by “intangibles.” That term can cover all sorts of things, and is often taken to refer to some special aspect of the firm in question, such as accumulated research and development, tacit knowledge or the “goodwill” associated with its brand.

At most, R&D is a small part of the story. The leading tech companies each spend between ten and twenty billion dollars a year on R&D, a tiny fraction of their market valuations. And while the big tech firms still retain plenty of goodwill among consumers, the attitude of their business partners is better described as one of resentful dependence. Software developers who want access to the iPhone market have little choice but to go through Apple’s App Store and give Apple 30 per cent of their revenue. Amazon’s Web Services platform has a similar hold on e-commerce. And so on.

The main intangible asset held by these companies is their monopoly power, which arises from network effects (every extra user adds to the value of the business for all users), their intellectual property, and good old-fashioned predatory behaviour. In this context, the crucial point about intangibles isn’t that they aren’t physical, it’s that they can’t be reproduced by anyone else.

No one can sell a Windows or Apple operating system, even if he or she were willing to invest the effort required to reverse-engineer it. While there are competitors for Google’s search engine (I recommend DuckDuckGo), the barriers to entry are huge, notably including the fact that the product is “free,” or rather supported by advertising for which all consumers pay whether they use Google or not.

There’s a complicated relationship here between the rise of monopoly and the development of the information economy in which the top tech firms operate. Information is the ultimate “non-rival” good. Once it’s generated by one person it can be shared with anyone else without diminishing in value. As the cost of communication has fallen, it’s become possible for everyone in the world to gain access to new information at essentially zero cost.

What this means is that there is very little relationship between the value of information and the ability of corporations to capture value from it. The protocols and languages that make the internet possible are a public good, created by collaborative effort and made freely available. The information on the internet is generated by households, businesses and governments using these protocols.

Without these public goods, Google would be worthless. But because advertising can be attached to search results, ownership of a search engine is immensely profitable. Similarly, Facebook’s value is derived entirely from the contributions of its users. Apple and Amazon are more like traditional businesses, but increasingly rely on internet services for their profits. Thus, a network created in the public sector has become the underlying infrastructure for private monopolies.

It is easier to diagnose the problem than to suggest a cure. Traditional remedies such as reversing anti-competitive mergers might improve the situation a little. But the ultimate solution is likely to require returning the internet to its non-commercial roots and treating crucial services like search and e-commerce platforms as public utilities, subject to tight regulation or public ownership.

Such changes would require a radical reversal of the opposition to public ownership that is still the default position of public policy, despite decades of failed market reforms. But if there is one thing that the last few years have taught us it is that, for good or ill, radical change only seems unthinkable until it happens. •

The post The big Apple appeared first on Inside Story.

The simplified system, said Morrison, “will make it easier for people to comply with requirements and spend more time searching for jobs, which is the key element of welfare reform.” Moreover, “this investment will also help us stop the rorts by giving our welfare cops the tools they need on the beat to collar those who are stealing from taxpayers by seeking to defraud the system.”

Those were the days. The government was in its first term and Morrison was an ambitious, gung-ho minister with a fondness for the police and military analogies that had stood him in such good stead in party circles when he was overseeing Operation Sovereign Borders.

Robodebt started the same year — though it didn’t acquire its pejorative nickname until later — and it reflected Morrison’s punitive approach. The increasing potential of automated data-matching — in Morrison’s words, the fact that more government systems were talking to each other — was for the first time making it cost-effective to pursue overpayments of welfare benefits.

The problem was that the systems were talking different languages. Crucially, the tax office was supplying income figures that couldn’t be matched to the benefits people were receiving. The government went ahead anyway, putting the onus on welfare recipients to prove the figures wrong, and causing real hardship and trauma, including reported suicides, among vulnerable people.

A program that had previously reviewed 20,000 cases a year conducted more than 900,000 reviews in the four years to the end of August last year, with 734,000 identified as having been overpaid. Except that many of them hadn’t been. Most of the reviews looked at benefits paid under Newstart and Youth Allowance, though they were eventually extended to other payments, including the age pension, the disability support pension, Austudy and the parenting payment.

Subsequent events have culminated in the government’s promise to pay back $721 million to 373,000 Australians for 470,000 illegally recovered and often non-existing debts. With almost two-thirds of the debts having been reversed, the government’s early depiction of the sunlit uplands looks particularly ironic.

Speaking on the same day as Morrison in 2015, human services minister Marise Payne was just as effusive about how data analytics would inform policy decisions. “Improvements to real-time data sharing between agencies will mean that, with customer consent, their information won’t have to be provided twice,” she said. “Improved data sharing will also significantly increase the government’s ability to detect and prevent fraud and non-compliance. This means customers who [simply] fail to update their details with us will be less likely to have to repay large debts and those who wilfully act to defraud taxpayers will be caught much more quickly.”

When applied to robodebt, this enumeration of the new system’s benefits turned out to be wrong or misleading in every detail. The data shared was not real-time: annual income figures from the tax office were averaged out to compare them with fortnightly benefit payments, producing many wrong assessments. Customers were not asked for their consent: they were pursued to provide information the government already had or was responsible for obtaining.

On top of all that, the relatively few perpetrators of welfare fraud are also being repaid their robodebt money because the government finally had to concede that the whole scheme broke the law. That admission came more than two years after Terry Carney made exactly that point as a member of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Carney, now a professor of law, has since described robodebt as “illegal, immoral and ill-constructed.”

The government is continuing with “online compliance intervention” — robodebt’s official title — but it will no longer use income averaging and it has promised other “refinements.” It has yet to give a clear commitment not to try to recover some of the same debts by different means. As Morrison put it earlier this month, the decision to refund the money “doesn’t mean those debts don’t exist. It just means that they cannot be raised solely on the basis of using income averaging.”

The government is also forging ahead with upgrading and increasingly automating its welfare payments system. Properly designed — and that’s a big caveat in the light of recent experience — the modernisation should make it easier for people to claim their correct benefits and easier for the government to make sure that they are paid the correct amounts.

The Welfare Payments Infrastructure Transformation project — the one described as among the biggest in the world five years ago — has another two years to run. Services Australia, formerly the Department of Human Services, claims that it has made practical improvements, including introducing prefilled claim forms using information already available to the government, enabling claims via mobile devices and verbally, and speeding up claims processing for some students and the unemployed. It boasts that the number of questions on the online claim form for students and trainees has been reduced from 117 to thirty-seven.

But, as the robodebt experience demonstrates, many of the new system’s claimed advantages are double-edged. The “digital assistants” introduced to answer customer questions, for example, mean less human interaction, which is reflected in staffing reductions that have already taken place. But most of us already know just how frustrating it can be dealing with digital assistants.

Similarly, analytics will be used to “proactively provide support to those who need it.” And also to take it away? A new “payment utility platform” promises same-day payments but also “simpler debt repayment processes.” In the wake of robodebt, how many people will be keen to use it?

A new “entitlement calculation engine” will determine payment levels. And if a person wants to challenge the calculation? Presumably they will be expected to sort it out with one of the new digital assistants.

It is one thing to increase automation for people well versed in the ways of the digital economy, but it is entirely another to impose it on vulnerable people who may or may not be familiar with online processing. As Australian Council of Social Service chief executive Cassandra Goldie told Inside Story this week, “Robodebt fundamentally failed because we stripped out the ‘human’ in human services. Instead it was up to individuals to try and prove their innocence in a David versus Goliath battle with automation.” For Goldie, humans must have a role in decisions about essential services like income support and “we must build in ways to enable people to easily correct decisions where mistakes have been made.”

In the end, it is how the system is designed that will determine the nature of the experience for its users and how much emphasis is placed on ferreting out suspected wrong claims.

Judged by the guidance from the top, the bias will be towards limiting entitlements. In 2018 the government introduced ParentsNext to add another layer of obligations to those already imposed on parents on low incomes who receive parenting payments. According to a Senate committee report, one in five parents had their payments suspended for missing appointments or failing to participate in “pre-employment” programs under this new scheme.

The social services minister who promised in 2015 to use the modernised welfare system to sool the “welfare cops” on to beneficiaries is now the prime minister who says the refunded debts still exist.

Having initially refused to apologise for robodebt for fear of legal liability, Morrison thought better of it and, in response to a pointed question from Bill Shorten, assured parliament of his deep regret for any hardship caused. But government services minister Stuart Robert immediately added that 939,000 Australians had $5 billion worth of debt “that the government lawfully has to collect across a whole range of programs.” Message? We’re still coming after you.

In her 2017 book Automating Inequality, American political scientist Virginia Eubanks describes how digital eligibility systems, matching algorithms and other tools have been used in the United States to drastically cut the welfare rolls. “At their worst these systems act as empathy overrides, allowing us to turn away from the most pressing problem of our age: the life- and soul-threatening legacy of institutional racism, classism and sexism in America,” she said in a speech last year. “They allow us to ignore our moral responsibility by replacing the messiness of human relationships with the predictable charms of systems engineering.”

It doesn’t need to be that way. But governments will have to resist the temptation to succumb to the convenience of allowing machines to make decisions that require judgement, compassion and humanity. •

The post Machine learning appeared first on Inside Story.

Most Australian and NZ coverage of the crisis has highlighted the role of defence forces in supplying aid to the Pacific islands, and the competition for influence with China. There’s been little news of how local organisations are ensuring food security for the urban unemployed and people previously reliant on overseas supply chains.

Non-government, church and community organisations are supporting the poor in urban centres, networking with rural communities and promoting healthy, local foodstuffs. They are not only drawing on Pacific traditions of reciprocity, family and sharing, but also tapping into new technologies, organic farming and social media.

Development consultant Feiloakitau Kaho Tevi, a former general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, highlighted the importance of family and community in a recent interview for the Global Research Programme on Inequality. “Families in Tonga have distributed their root crops freely in trying to help those in need,” he said. “A barter trade market on the internet is exploding in Fiji where individuals are exchanging goods and services, trying to help each other fare through these difficult times.”

Stories like these are coming in from many Pacific islands, Tevi said. “In some sense, it is not surprising that Pacific islanders react as such, given our communal living and our sense of caring for the other.”

Many people have responded with resilience and creativity — setting up barter networks for those without cash, shifting from export crops to local markets, returning to the village to work on family gardens and, above all, planting, planting and planting. “Our reactions to the pandemic, by far, have been more localised; falling back on our strengths as Pacific islanders: our sense of reciprocity and community living; living off our land,” said Tevi. “It was a consolation of some sort that the solutions to our ‘hardship’ are to be found in our own plantations and villages.”

This sentiment is echoed by the secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum, Dame Meg Taylor. When I spoke to her for Islands Business magazine, she welcomed international assistance, but highlighted the local mobilisation across the region: “After health, there’s going to be recovery around food security and environmental security. I think in the bigger islands, one of the good things is that everybody is planting and going back to our natural resources to feed ourselves. My own family and community in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea are getting their gardens going, so if there’s a long period of isolation, they will survive.”

Although the Solomon Islands has recorded no cases of Covid-19, the island nation had its own shock in April when Tropical Cyclone Harold hit, with devastating consequences. The government announced a state of emergency and the associated economic downturn has seen many people leaving the capital, Honiara, to ride out the crisis in their home villages on outlying islands. People in town are turning to family connections for support, and using social media to promote exchange and barter.

Alex Haro, principal of the Woodford International School in Honiara, joined with a group of friends to establish Trade Bilong Iumi, a Facebook page that allows people to barter and exchange necessities during the downturn.

“I started Trade Bilong Iumi because I had a lot of friends who had financial difficulties, so we came up with the initiative of this Facebook page,” Haro tells me. “Basically, there is no money involved, just the exchanging of goods and services. This is for Solomon Islanders if they have problems with their finance — this is their platform.”

Use of the page is gradually increasing. “For example, there were people from the [Weather] Coast, they actually needed some taro. So, they went fishing and then went on the Facebook page and said, ‘We’ve got some tuna and we need some bags of taro or cassava’ — and they actually exchanged the goods.”

For Haro, social media can build on existing cultural values among Melanesian communities. “This is what we have been practising back in the olden days — that’s how our ancestors have survived,” he says. “Our wantok system is very different to the Western world where you look after yourself, but here it’s about the community. If someone’s got a problem, then the brother or the sister or the aunty will step in. That’s how we survive.”

In other countries, activists are using social media to establish non-commercial barter networks, especially for people who have lost their jobs in the waged economy.

In Suva, the Barter for a Better Fiji group has 170,000 supporters and more than 4400 members on its public Facebook page. Administrator Marlene Dutta set up the site to encourage people who are doing it tough to connect with others. “Back in the before when money was sooo tomorrow,” say the organisers, “our ancestrals lived by exchanging what they had for what they needed. Easy eh? How about we do that again now? Some smart gang already doing it one-on-one style… but what if there was a space for everyone to trade? Well folks, this is it.”

In response, people have posted requests for food, clothes or other items, offering to barter an eclectic mix of goods: “My daughter’s tricycle for groceries (Rewa powder milk; 2kg sugar; 4kg rice, 2 tin tuna, eggs, oil, Maggi noodle etc)”; “One rooster to exchange with 2 x stereo speakers”; “A metal sink for fish and cassava”; “Seven kilos of waqa [kava] for a good smart phone.” One person has even offered tattoos in exchange for goods.

A different sort of pandemic-era scheme is running in Lautoka, Fiji’s second-largest town. Widely known as “Sugar City,” Lautoka is located in the sugar-cane belt on the west coast of the main island, Viti Levu. It was the site of Fiji’s first sugar mill, built by indentured labour from India and Solomon Islands and launched in 1903 by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company.

Lautoka also recorded Fiji’s first confirmed cases of Covid-19, after a flight attendant from Fiji Airways was diagnosed on 19 March. Within three days, two members of his family were also diagnosed with the disease.

Having already banned cruise ships and restricted international air travel, the Fiji government moved to quarantine Sugar City to limit the possibility of further community transfer. During the initial two-week lockdown, police roadblocks prevented people from leaving the city, except for essential travel.

“When the lockdown was announced, we thought we were just shutting the office and going home,” Sashi Kiran tells me. “But after a couple of days it was very obvious that people in Lautoka who were dependent on the city — hawkers, casual workers, wheelbarrow boys and other people with day jobs — were asked to stay at home at short notice. People who live week to week or even day to day were asking for food.”

Kiran is director of the Foundation for Rural Integrated Enterprises and Development, or FRIEND, a non-government organisation that has run programs on socioeconomic development, health and welfare in Lautoka for nearly two decades. Kiran says the overnight lockdown of the city created immediate problems for the poorest members of the community.

“Within days we partnered with organisations like the counselling body Empower Pacific,” she says. “Eighty per cent of the calls were people asking for food, and we also had the challenge of people not being able to access their medications. We asked for public assistance and people were very generous and we started doing food distribution. Unfortunately, it was raining very heavily because of Tropical Cyclone Harold and people couldn’t come outside. Our people were going out to impacted areas and to homes to deliver food, so we’ve been on the ground since March.”

Even before Fiji was hit by the double whammy of the coronavirus pandemic and the category-five cyclone, food security and good nutrition had been an issue for some rural communities and people living in peri-urban squatter settlements. The country has significant rates of non-communicable diseases, and studies around the world are showing that the risk of severe illness from Covid-19 is compounded by obesity and diabetes.

During the pandemic, lack of access to food or cash has created new pressures. In response, FRIEND has expanded existing programs to help people grow nutritionally diverse food, to ensure that children don’t face malnutrition.

“For people in town without land, we’ve been doing training on how to grow food in sacks or containers,” says Kiran. “Access to land in the squatter settlements, including the poorest communities, is a major challenge. They don’t have resources where they can plant. Sometimes when we reach people, they say, ‘My children haven’t eaten for the last three days.’ At that time, because of the cyclone, the rain and the Covid lockdown, they couldn’t even go to the shore to fish.”

Lautoka City Council responded to NGO requests for land with two blocks, including almost a hectare near some of the squatter communities. “The youth are preparing that land and planting,” says Kiran. “With this communal garden, the youth will be able to harvest and give people the food they need.”

The Covid-19 crisis is creating opportunities for young people to develop businesses around sustainable agriculture and nutrition. Youth entrepreneur Rinesh Sharma founded Smart Farms Fiji in April, and has been marketing basic hydroponic systems for households without land to grow leafy foods and vegetables, to supplement their diet.

Non-government organisations are also reaching out to rural communities, to support urban workers who have lost jobs and income during the current crisis. “We’ve also spoken with i-Taukei landowners and Indian farmers, and some villages have allocated large pieces of land, five acres or ten acres, to grow food,” Kiran said. “This is getting ready for people from the tourism industry who have lost jobs and who are coming back to their home village.”

In one case, she says, people from Tailevu brought food to people from their villages who are living in Lautoka. “Through these communal gardens, the surplus can be shared with their own people.”

Before the crisis, Pacific governments were supporting farmers’ networks through training and agricultural extension programs. Regional intergovernmental organisations like the Pacific Community, or SPC, have made food and water security a central element of their work on disaster preparedness and climate adaptation. For many years, the SPC has been testing new crops that can withstand the extremes of drought, flooding and salinity brought on by climate change.

In Marshall Islands, for example, the SPC has been supporting the Readiness for El Niño project since 2017. Women from outlying drought-prone islands like Ailuk and Kwajalein have established community nurseries, introduced improved soil management and drought-resistant crop varieties, and expanded water storage. Since the Covid-19 lockdown, new initiatives such as the Seeds for Life project, implemented by the SPC and Manaaki Whenua Land Care Research, have improved access to planting materials in Kiribati, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

This government work is complemented by the grassroots farmers’ networks of the region-wide Pacific Farmers Association. These local groups have encouraged the development of seed banks, communal gardens and organic farming, while seeking to improve livelihoods and food security for smallholders and village-based farmers. The long-established networks are all the more important today, as unemployed people move back to the provinces to clear land and make gardens.

For twenty years, the Kastom Gaden Association, or KGA, has been supporting farmers in villages as well as urban settlements around Solomon Islands. KGA developed sup sup gardens (backyard plots) in Honiara’s settlements, and its Planting Material Network has nearly 3000 members across the country.

“Kastom Gaden has already created gene banks or germplasm centres in the provinces,” KGA coordinator Pita Tikai explains. “We had some partners that we worked with to establish germplasm collections, like a seed garden. Farmers can access some planting material, especially at this time where people are going crazy looking for seeds, looking for planting materials in order to grow things.”

Tikai says that KGA hasn’t so far seen food shortages, “but you can see people going round who have lost full time jobs, so they are resorting to making backyard gardens,” he says. “People are looking for seeds, people are looking for planting materials. Currently we haven’t got this full lockdown, but people are wondering what the future will be like. People are getting gardens so they will have food stocks if we have a real crisis and confirmed cases [of Covid-19] and the government suddenly gives us a total lockdown.”

The disruption of transport has halted some agricultural exports, along with imports of crucial farming resources like seeds and fertilisers: “Commercial seeds coming into the country are already affected. If you go to shops around town that normally sell seeds, they say, ‘Our orders are yet to come in.’ So here in town, people are flooding to KGA’s main office here in Honiara, asking for nursery seedlings. Our partners are also asking us to raise seedlings that they can supply to their communities.”

Tikai believes that donors and government departments should be working in collaboration with existing networks established by non-government organisations. “I really want the government to work with us, as NGOs, to strengthen these gene banks and seed collections. The government is now thinking about establishing seed gardens, but we at Kastom Gaden already had this network of farmers and seed gardens around the country that people can source planting materials.”

The government’s agriculture ministry has begun distributing some free seedlings, says Tikai, “but it’s time for collaboration between stakeholders, especially from the line ministry, to support us to strengthen this network for when the real disaster comes. If there’s full lockdown, then people can find the materials that they need to survive. That would sustain the food supply and also help avoid a food health crisis that might happen in future.”

Food production is also closely linked to tourism, which makes up more than 40 per cent of the GDP of Fiji, Vanuatu and Palau.

Tourists are also a major earner for the Polynesian atoll nation of Cook Islands. Despite talk of a “tourism bubble” involving Australia, New Zealand and some island nations, the downturn in tourist numbers has damaged Rarotonga’s burgeoning organic agriculture industry. Growers face collapsing sales to tourist hotels, and are looking to find new markets for local production.

According to organic farmer Missy Vakapora, secretary of Natura Kuki Airani, or NKA, the Cook Islands organic farming industry has taken a significant hit as overseas visitors stay away. “The growers that I know are finding it very hard because the majority of them supply the resorts and they are losing money,” she tells me. “For organic growers, it’s often the tourists — whether from New Zealand or America or Australia — who buy our organic produce. So, with the crisis, we’ve lost this market, all up about 60 per cent of our business.”

But there is a positive side. “The majority of us have had to drop our organic prices to normal prices, so now local people have a choice between conventional products and the organic products which are much more affordable than they were before the virus hit.”

Vakapora believes there will be significant shifts in agriculture as long as the pandemic lasts. “The majority of growers are planting short-term crops now, more for the quick turnover,” she says. “There’s a lot more leafy products out there than normal. They’re not growing all the fancy stuff like carrots and radishes that the local people don’t like — they’ve returned to traditional foods like taro, kumara, local snake beans and other local varieties.”

The hit to markets and transport has also disrupted initiatives to expand organic farming in the Cook Islands. In 2015, the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development and the SPC came to Rarotonga to encourage a shift to organic production among local farmers. Growers were trained to use certified bio-organic materials and develop the naturally grown teas or herbs that are popular among older Cook Islanders. Farmers soon recognised the need for an organic seedbank in Cook Islands — an initiative that was almost completed when the coronavirus pandemic hit.

“The seed bank that we’re trying to get up and running is at the prison,” Vakapora tells me. “They actually have a conventional garden, right in the middle of the prison where nobody goes and they decided to go organic. Before the current crisis, it was just starting to get going. Through IFAD and SPC, we got funding for the cooling system for seeds, and we were just about to start generating the seeds for the prison when the coronavirus hit.

“Fiji were just about to send us open-pollinated seeds that were already certified organic, which would have been easier for us to plant at the prison, then harvest and secure the storage for them. However, the virus hit and we couldn’t get the seeds. It’s on hold until the borders open.”

How long will it be until that happens? Until a Covid-19 vaccine is developed and distributed, the global economy faces a long, slow return to pre-pandemic levels of activity. In the meantime, people are looking to develop more sustainable modes of development — and it’s clear that Pacific farmers are even more essential than before to lives and livelihoods across the region. •

The post Smart harvest appeared first on Inside Story.

On Zoom, it’s different. At Claire Edwardes’s concert last month, the Sydney percussionist played my vibraphone piece, Hook, and there they were: the paying public, with glasses of wine and bowls of nuts, watching and listening from the privacy of their homes. Except there wasn’t much privacy. One could look not only into their eyes, but also into their living rooms. It bordered on voyeurism, yet it felt collegial.

Claire introduced the short pieces in her hour-long program and, following each performance, the audience members in their little on-screen boxes unmuted themselves to submit their applause. They were also invited to comment on what they’d heard. And they were kind to me and my piece, even though I was, to them, an invisible presence, the camera perched on top of my monitor having chosen this moment to go on the fritz.

I’ve been wondering, since, about the place and role of the composer in the concert hall. Composers are mostly not performers; in rehearsal we may work with performers, but at the performance, when they’re up on stage playing our music, we’re in row M. If the piece is well received, we will probably be called upon to take a bow, but that will be the extent of our involvement on the night. Mind you, once the bow is taken and the figure in row M outed as the composer, interesting interactions often occur with other audience members.

There are those who want to tell you they enjoyed your music (the people who haven’t enjoyed it mostly keep away), some of whom will have questions. My favourite responses involve the listeners who tell you how the piece made them feel or what memories it conjured. I was once told, by a farmer in northern Tasmania, that she had been reminded of getting up in the middle of a freezing winter’s night to assist with calving. The piece was called Pastoral.

Audience feedback is important to all musicians — even, I suspect, to those who claim otherwise. Composers are no different. Ours is a solitary activity. Consumed by the need to get the music right, all else goes out of the window, and at that point the audience is the last thing on your mind. If the music doesn’t satisfy you, you’ll be offering the listener either damaged goods or a well-made fake. The process of rehearsing isn’t that different. It might not be solitary, but it will likely be hermetic. But there’s no point to any of it — those weeks or months of composing, those hours or days of rehearsal — without the audience at the end.

It’s a triangular relationship between composer, performer and audience, and it’s only slightly different when the composer and performer are one and the same. Musicians might believe they know what their music means when they write or sing or play it, but individual members of an audience make new meanings as they listen. We hear the same music, but feel it differently. If it sounds, to one listener, like a cow giving birth, then that is what it is.

Online concerts are no different. Indeed the listeners’ responses may be more varied than ever, now we are all more alone. But something is lost when we no longer sit tightly packed in the same hall having our individual experiences alongside one another. It’s an unspoken yet strongly felt emotional connection that comes via the music. Is it body language, is it breathing that conveys it? At its most powerful, it is a kind of magic, and for the time being we are having to do without it.

Last week, Opera Australia announced the cancellation of its entire winter season. This included the postponement of Rembrandt’s Wife, my opera written with Sue Smith, which was to have had seasons in both Sydney and Melbourne. Sue and I had already had a meeting with the director, the evidently brilliant Tabatha McFadyen, who’d have been making her debut in this new production; Mark Thompson’s designs were ready to go; I could barely wait to hear one of Australia’s great singers, Taryn Fiebig, in the dual roles of Saskia van Uylenburgh and Hendrickje Stoffels.

Above all, though, I wanted to be in row M, sharing the experience of this brand-new production with an audience of total strangers, and gleaning their responses to a piece of work that had taken over my imagination for nearly eighteen months. That moment of direct communication is now indefinitely on hold, as are countless others. In company with most musicians, my schedule of live performances for 2020 is completely blank.

But as online concerts increasingly pop up, and little groups of listeners peer into each other’s homes, it may be that this new method of musical communication, one that allows us to observe the performer at close quarters and then discuss the music with the performer and composer, will remain. In a way, these sorts of events predate the concert hall. They are authentic chamber music — from the performer’s chamber direct to yours — and they permit a level of engagement and interaction that the concert hall can’t match. They will never match the excitement of a live event with an audience — the opera theatre, the jazz club, the rock band in the pub, the outdoor festival — but for musicians prepared to reveal more of themselves and audiences keen to watch musicians at work from just a metre or two away, there’s surely no going back. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post The new chamber music appeared first on Inside Story.

This information overload provides fertile ground for misinformation and conspiracy theorists. An unholy alliance is emerging of anti-vaxxers, China hawks and gun-toting libertarians, ready to seduce the credulous and the disaffected. Marlon Brando’s Johnny in The Wild One said it best: asked “What are you rebelling against?” he replied, “Whadda you got?”

Some dedicated souls are refuting the lies, piece by piece. But observing the old internet adage, don’t feed the trolls, I prefer to slip down the more orthodox rabbit holes.

One driver of this truly revolutionary explosion of scientific literature has been the changing ecosystem of academic publication. When journals as printed and bound artefacts lost their salience, their publishers moved online, relying on legacy reputations buttressed by prestigious editorial boards. It didn’t take long for pay-to-publish outfits to emerge, recognising there was money to be made by exploiting the publishing imperative among the oversupply of university staff. Distinctions between legitimate and predatory publishers became increasingly hard to navigate.

But in the last few years the environment has changed again. Bibliometric and altmetric measures of citations and impact, combined with legitimate publishers’ databases, are increasingly used to determine access to research funding and academic promotion.

If peer-reviewed and quality-controlled journals are the high-end retail outlets for these research products, the warehouses are the preprint servers. In the natural sciences, the arXiv (pronounced archive) has been around for thirty years. In other fields, these repositories are much newer. MedRxiv, where much of the Covid-19 literature has appeared, was launched less than a year ago. With its sister repository, bioRxiv, it lists 3172 Covid-19 articles, a figure that’s growing rapidly: a quick count shows twenty-nine articles added on 10 May and forty-three the day before.

These preprint servers are not a complete free-for-all. They are hosted by reputable institutions and are moderated, at least to a degree, and sorted into relevant subject categories. But the articles are posted before peer review, and many will never make it through that process. The urgency of slowing the Covid-19 epidemic and staving off deaths makes it very tempting to scour these servers for the latest research, but that comes with the risk of spurious results and junk science.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, proposes a way of identifying the best of this research. Scite.ai is a new tool powered by machine learning that trawls through mountains of scientific literature and not only counts the number of citations in other papers but also tracks whether subsequent mentions support or contradict the original paper. Some papers are widely cited because they are the best example of what not to do — Scite.ai enables a rapid sifting of right from wrong.

Galen and Avicenna would have recognised trial and error as basic to the scientific method. AI makes possible a major shift in this paradigm: for example, chemists can now use retrosynthesis methods to deconstruct and then reconstruct molecules, and potentially engineer drugs with very precise targets — blocking virus replication, for example.

The contrast couldn’t be greater with the fabled serendipitous breakthrough that dominates how we imagine drug discovery. (“On the morning of Friday 28 September 1928 Alexander Fleming finds that the mould growing on a petri dish accidentally left on a shelf kills bacteria, and so penicillin is born.”) AI wants to do away with this image altogether. The slightly ominous-sounding BenevolentAI is a case in point: setting its algorithms loose on a vast database of potential drugs, it pinpoints arthritis drug baricitinib as the most promising compound to combat SARS-CoV-2, and propels it into human trials.

The same shift is happening in vaccine development. Ever since Edward Jenner discovered that a dab of cowpox could be used to fight smallpox, vaccination has worked with two basic strategies: using either a killed version of the virus in question or live virus altered enough to cause only the immune reaction and not the full-blown disease.

For SARS-CoV-2, new techniques are in play to engineer vaccines from first principles, creating a vaccine that inserts itself into a particular site in the molecular pathway to disrupt the virus’s colonisation of the host DNA.

In the early AIDS days, gene-based techniques were in their infancy. I vividly remember a conversation in 1993 with a friend who, with a mix of hope and desperation, was betting his last throw of the dice on gene-splicing techniques he had heard about from Canada. He never got to try them.

At the time, antibody tests using a pinprick of blood were the stalwarts of HIV diagnosis. PCR assays, which amplify genetic fragments from a sample, were useful for confirming borderline cases, but they were cumbersome and prohibitively expensive.

That world has been turned on its head. PCR and other gene-amplification methods are the readily available go-to options for a test. Once the virus was isolated it could be plugged into the machines and reliable tests set up in a matter of days, as Victoria showed. Antibody testing has proved much more difficult, partly because we are still learning about the nature and timing of the antibody response to Covid-19.

To be useful, diagnostic tests need to meet two thresholds that point in different directions: sensitivity, when the test is fine-tuned enough to detect the virus if it is there; and specificity, when the test reacts to the virus in question and not to similar signals. Insufficient sensitivity will produce false negative results; insufficient specificity will produce false positives. Fast and dodgy operators thought they could bang together an antibody test for Covid-19 and rush it to market, but getting that balance right turned out to be much trickier than expected.

Remarkably, CRISPR technology — the gene-splicing technique that enables a small slice of DNA to be cut out and replaced — is coming to the rescue. Thirty years ago this was the very definition of cutting-edge science. Today, a CRISPR-based test stands ready to transform Covid-19 diagnostics, with the promise of a test simple and cheap enough for home use.

When the human genome was first fully described after a thirteen-year, multimillion-dollar project, it was hailed as the dawn of a new era of precision medicine. But gene therapies didn’t start rolling out the door, and the hype faded. Maybe it was a slow burn.

Covid-19 is perhaps the first pandemic with a genomic response: from epidemiology to diagnostics, to therapeutics, to vaccines, the virus’s genome has been front and centre. This pandemic is the crucible in which these genetically based and rationally designed approaches fuelled by AI will prove their mettle — or not.

For an alternative to these ponderings on science, here are a couple of great reads from the last few days.

Rutger Bregman’s new book Humankind is out in English next week, and as a teaser he offers the uplifting tale of a real-world Lord of the Flies in which a group of shipwrecked boys descended not into chaos but rather into amiable cooperation.

One of the smartest of development economists, Dani Rodrik, has considered what a better globalisation could look like. When Australia has not been too busy being Washington’s poodle, it has been a leading advocate of a rules-based global order. Those rules will need to be redrawn in a post-Covid world, and Rodrik provides a good pointer. •

The post The first genomic pandemic appeared first on Inside Story.

Partly it’s the secrecy that surrounds cyber operations, which is where Ben Buchanan, a researcher with Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, comes in. In The Hacker and the State, he charts the rise of cyber operations as a tool of state, using clear and vivid examples from the main players in the cyber contest — the United States, Russia, Iran, China and North Korea — to show us how this armoury is used by governments to advance their goals, and how cyber operations have evolved over time.

In a nutshell, Buchanan’s argument is that cyber operations are good for shaping but not for signalling. In high-stakes international statecraft, cyber capabilities are a versatile way of changing the facts on the ground, altering the balance of power, and seizing the advantage. Like all covert operations, though, they aren’t good for signalling intentions. Even when the effects of a cyber operation are visible, victims are often reluctant to reveal details publicly, and the expertise and time needed to determine who did what makes it difficult to quickly and reliably judge what has happened, who was to blame, and why they did it.

Buchanan shows that cyber operations can be used for different purposes: for espionage, which it has helped vastly expand in scale and scope; for attack, putting at risk critical infrastructure worldwide; and for disruption, making it possible to interfere with elections via keyboard. Cyber operations are not only being used as an everyday tool of statecraft, they are perhaps the most significant of those tools.

In a very real sense, though, the countries in the cyber game don’t just have different playing styles, they are playing different games. Western nations play cricket while our opponents play rugby — different games, with different goals on a different playing field — with the latter a far more robust, physical contest than we’ve been willing to engage in.

In the field of espionage, one example of this mismatch is China’s theft of intellectual property. Western intelligence agencies focus narrowly on military and government intelligence, but Chinese hackers have also sought intellectual property on a scale that has been described as the “greatest transfer of wealth in history.” Chinese military hackers have stolen intellectual property, trade secrets and negotiating positions from Western companies across finance, telecommunications, electronics, medical equipment, resources and more in over a dozen countries. Although this flow of secrets and technology dates back to at least the early 2000s, Western countries have failed to staunch the bleeding.

After covering a series of significant cyber espionage cases, Buchanan describes cyber-attacks on targets including nuclear fuel enrichment facilities, petrochemical plants, casinos and electricity networks. One such incident that shocked the US national security community was the targeting of Sony Pictures Entertainment by North Korean state hackers. To the displeasure of the North Korean regime, Sony was making a satirical movie about the assassination of supreme leader Kim Jung-un. In retaliation, North Korean government hackers breached the company, destroyed computers, leaked several unreleased movies onto the internet and stole emails that they released to damage the studio in a stream of embarrassing media stories.

The US government was stunned by the attack. After all, what are the possible diplomatic or military responses when a movie studio and film release are at stake? But despite the apparent inadequacy of its response — naming and shaming North Korea — the operation turned out to be a failure for the North. After threats of a terrorist attack, The Interview didn’t play in major theatre chains, but in a kind of cyber-Streisand effect it owes most of its fame to the state-sponsored theatrics that accompanied its launch.

Finally, there’s the capacity of cyber operations to destabilise and interfere. Buchanan comprehensively describes how Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential elections using social media, by hacking Democratic Party institutions and by releasing stolen documents to sway public opinion. The media has often focused on how Russia manipulated social media to stoke division and outrage, but Buchanan looks in detail at not one but two Russian-backed operations working to compromise the Democratic National Convention, and shows how these “traditional” cyber-espionage operations were used to gather material that was leaked to and subsequently amplified by the mainstream media.

Another case with immediate policy relevance is the long saga of what is known as Dual_EC, an encryption standard whose adoption was driven by the National Security Agency, the American intelligence organisation responsible for both signals intelligence and information security (or hacking to gather intelligence and defending against hackers). Buchanan surveys the intriguing — albeit circumstantial — evidence that the NSA deliberately weakened the Dual_EC standard and encouraged its adoption so that it could eavesdrop on communications that relied on the standard. At the very least, a series of curiously poor design choices resulted in commercial products that were — for those who knew how to exploit them — totally insecure.

Whether they were deliberate or accidental, these weaknesses in the implementation of Dual_EC were, in a very subtle way, exploited by hackers in China, according to Buchanan’s sources. Either the NSA, one of the most technically sophisticated intelligence agencies on the planet, was unable to make a backdoor that couldn’t be exploited by its adversaries, or it was unable to produce an encryption algorithm that couldn’t be secretly hijacked by an adversary. Both possibilities highlight the difficulty of designing secure encrypted communications systems: introducing a “secure weakness” — one that can only be used by those with the right legal authorities — is not simple, and may not be possible without opening up poorly recognised vulnerabilities.

Without resorting to sensationalism, and in a measured, clear-eyed way, Ben Buchanan wonderfully describes how states employ cyber operations to advance their goals. But the logical next question is “what is the best way to deal with our adversaries’ cyber operations?”

For the players described in The Hacker and the State the immediate future is clear — they will continue to use cyber operations to advance their interests. China will continue to steal intellectual property. Iran and Russia will continue making occasionally destructive attacks, and Russia will continue to use cyber operations to bolster its global ambitions. North Korea will continue to steal money. The United States will continue to follow International Humanitarian Law and engage in narrowly scoped operations.

Cyber capabilities are relatively cheap and are proliferating as other countries see their value and effectiveness. The risks of malicious behaviour increase as we place ever more of our lives online.

Continuing with the status quo is not an option. Now that we’ve seen how they are used, we need to turn our minds to how they will be deterred. There is another book’s worth of material in that subject. •

The post War by other means appeared first on Inside Story.

Initial estimates of the number of downloads needed for COVIDSafe to be effective have also been walked back. While a high take-up rate is needed to capture the network dynamics that will give the app real power, even lower levels of coverage will presumably provide some assistance to the manual process of contact tracing that has thus far been the mainstay of Australian epidemic control efforts.

By linking the end of physical distancing and the resumption of full economic activity to the extent of COVIDSafe’s take-up, the government is embarking on an unusually explicit exercise in collective social responsibility. If nothing else, it will highlight the extent to which everyday life depends on civic mutuality. The debate about the app has also vastly increased awareness of the normally hidden privacy issues that underlie every online exchange: exactly the type of explicit attention that Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, was aimed at.

In the process, two models are fighting it out: one in which personal data exchange is subject to informed consent as part of a social bargain freely entered into; the other in which shadowy corporations collaborate with state apparatuses to maximise covert surveillance. The Australian government is seeking to position COVIDSafe within the first; its opponents fear it is a version of the second.

Those concerned about opaque surveillance viewed with alarm the news that a company called Palantir is involved in creating Covid-related data-management systems for a slew of health systems, including Britain’s National Health Service and the US Department of Health and Human Services. Palantir is about as controversial as a data-mining company can get: founded with money from the CIA’s venture-capital arm, it provides services for arms manufacturers, defence departments and counterterrorism operations, was behind the Los Angeles Police Department’s attempt to implement “predictive policing” by profiling potential criminals so well that they could be stopped before crimes were committed, and extended the capacity of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to carry out deportations. For Palantir’s opponents, the cherry on the cake is that its founder, Peter Thiel, is Donald Trump’s most prominent Silicon Valley supporter.

At the core of Palantir’s value proposition is that it will put together vast amounts of disparate information faster and better than anyone else, a feat that is especially important when faced with disruption, whether from terrorists or viruses. “Taking control of complex systems” is identified by Palantir as the key task in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic: “leaders must roll up their sleeves, demand the information required to build a common operating picture, and take back control of the decisions.” And, needless to say, Palantir can help: “this is a problem that can be addressed by smart deployment of technology to augment and support institutional decision makers and the critical analysis they need to carry out to make sound decisions.”

This narrative of taking control faces a counter view that sees control as a dangerous fantasy. Andy Stirling of Britain’s Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability Centre makes the case strongly:

There is of course no shortage of apparently effective instruments available to seemingly controlling “cockpits”: dispassionately assured experts; precise scientific metrics; rigorous technical models; massive hierarchical agencies; apparently all-seeing monitoring; seductively informative graphics; compellingly captivating dashboards; reassuringly evidence-based plans; commanding policy levers; invisibly nudging techniques; formidable military capacities; all presided over by our “natural leaders” in the same old “seats of power.” But in reality, what the pandemic already seems to show is not only that there is no pilot… but that the “cockpit” itself has been built largely in our imaginations.

Underlying this view is an ecological model of complex adaptive systems. Here, systems are just as much a focus as in the control model, but much less faith is placed in finding the levers of control that can adjust system properties while avoiding unintended consequences.

Universally adopted apps are just the latest version of an all-seeing panopticon as an instrument of control. But, as Michel Foucault proposed, the disciplinary power of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon — the prison design that has all the prisoners’ cells in a circle facing the central watchtower — was not that it enabled each prisoner’s behaviour to be corrected through direct observation but that it was the mere possibility of being observed that led prisoners to correct themselves. This transition from external control to self-government became the prominent theme of Foucault’s later work on the operation of power in advanced liberal societies.

Looking at the reports of police-issued fines for breaches of lockdown laws in Australia and elsewhere, you might think that external control is far more important than self-government. But the eruption of civil disobedience in some countries suggests that the power of policing to impose authority from outside is limited in its scope and duration.

It is now dawning on citizens in many places that social regulation in the face of the pandemic will continue not just for days or weeks, but for months to come. Even under the most optimistic scenarios of control and near elimination in a few countries like Australia and New Zealand, the smallest outbreaks will need to be detected, the immediate vicinity quarantined, contacts traced, tests made widely, and the arrival of foreigners strictly controlled. These social technologies will need a high degree of popular support, and the negative impacts of distancing will need to be counteracted by increased, and very local, solidarity.

Most crucial will be the need to counter the tendency to “othering,” or locating the threat in those who are different. This is a story we know well from AIDS: I remember seeing an interview with a drug user imprisoned in Russia — a country whose refusal to adopt harm-reduction policies drove the major and still-growing HIV epidemic there — explaining that the saving grace was that they didn’t have HIV in his block, unlike the block over there, he added, gesturing across the footpath. Enacting imaginary boundaries is both futile and counterproductive in an epidemic.

Elsewhere, a magisterial review of the social and behavioural science literature on Covid-19 responses, initiated by New York University’s Jay Van Bavel, is available as a preprint version. In themselves, the 255 articles it covers would constitute a fine curriculum for a course on social responses to emerging diseases. Given the first version of the article was pulled together in a week, the fact that all but two of the fifty-plus authors are from rich English-speaking countries is excusable: its amplification to a wider range of global voices is surely on the agenda.

Among its key take-home messages is that the creation of shared social norms is critical in changing social conduct. The indirect effect — my view of what I think my neighbour is doing — may be more important than anything else. The authors show the vital importance of “dyadic, synchronous” connection — in other words, communicating in real time with real friends one-to-one, whether in person or on a device, is vastly more important than message posting.

They also suggest that it may be possible to inoculate against fake news by seeding false stories and using them to generate understanding about the ways misinformation circulates. But, perhaps most crucially for Australia at this time, they suggest that it may be maladaptive for countries to promote their successes compared with other countries. This type of “collective narcissism”

is associated with a greater focus on defending the image of the country, rather than on caring for its citizens. It is also correlated with seeing out-groups as a threat and blaming them for in-group misfortunes. To increase a willingness to take a pandemic seriously and engage with other nations to defeat it, citizens and leaders may need to accept that their country is at risk, just like others, and find ways to share resources and expertise across national boundaries.

That message was amplified across the globe last weekend in the mammoth “one world together at home” concert in support of the World Health Organization’s efforts against the pandemic. Assembled by former Young Australian of the Year Hugh Evans, co-founder of Global Citizen, together with Lady Gaga and her mum, this unique streaming concert brought together just about every musical big name.

Its parallel in the world of policymaking was the launch of the ACT Accelerator, a global collaboration to advance the development of Covid-19 tools and therapeutics and ensure their availability to all.

As the paradigm shifts, we can see the links between local acts of mutual support, the coordination of national activity while avoiding the hubris of total control, and effective mechanisms of global solidarity. This is where we need to invest our energies. •

The post Panopticon in your pocket appeared first on Inside Story.

But should this process — known as contact tracing — be automated? And if so, how?

The Australian government’s Covid-19 app highlights the complexities of rolling out digital contact-tracing technology in a democratic society. Dealing with a public health crisis is vital, but it mustn’t be an excuse to infringe personal privacy and extend government surveillance. Can the two goals — controlling the virus and protecting privacy — be achieved simultaneously?

Debate is raging globally about the design conventions needed to ensure contact-tracing apps do exactly that. International conventions and frameworks are being established collaboratively at breakneck speed.

The speed is important, not only because governments are looking to use these tools that are in many cases privately managed, if open-sourced, but also because the new data-tracking conventions are likely to stick around long after the vaccine arrives.

Fighting the coronavirus asks all of us to collaborate, constructively, in using digital technology to solve a public health crisis. Given we’re not coming off a strong base of cooperation, this is not going to be easy.

In Australia, the government faces a major personal-data trust deficit. The botched implementation of the NBN, robodebt and the digital census all bolster concerns about the government’s capacity to manage data and raise fears that it is unlikely to get it right this time.

Internationally, trust in the big digital platforms — in their capacity to govern the flow of information in ways that uphold the principles of a free and open internet — has been at an all-time low since the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The incapacity or unwillingness of Facebook and other major platforms to stem the tide of misinformation has acted as a wrecking ball among the major global democracies.

China’s rapid pivot towards artificial intelligence, meanwhile, has amply demonstrated how vertically integrated digital infrastructure can be mobilised to limit the freedoms of citizens and quash dissent.

Not surprisingly, many technology critics have been quick to argue that technological tools alone are not the answer — that we need to look beyond the “solutionism” offered by tech companies seeking to bake public health systems into their own infrastructure.

But just as we shouldn’t accept the false trade-off between public health and digital privacy, as many rightly argue, should we also simply accept that public authorities are incapable of implementing technology systems effectively? Must we tolerate a trade-off between trust and innovation, reinforced by lack of confidence in how government uses personal data?

The trust deficit now means many see government as lacking “a social licence to operate.” To people like Lizzie O’Shea, chair of Digital Rights Watch in Australia, the government “has a long way to go before it comes close to earning it.” As a result, there remains an ever-accelerating divide between what governments can achieve and the magic tricks the private sector is capable of.

To chart a path forward, we need a different approach — and a different kind of public dialogue about the nature and purpose of public sector technology innovation. Right now, we need to define exactly what technologies are fit for purpose to fight the coronavirus in our technologically advanced, contemporary democracies.

The past couple of weeks have seen rapid progress on these questions. New frameworks and protocols are emerging quickly, and the Australian government would do well to adhere to them.

The first and most important is data decentralisation. This is critical to limiting the danger of “surveillance creep” that comes with digital tracking apps and services. Decentralisation essentially involves limiting how any data collected through trace-and-track apps can be stored and shared.

The Morrison government’s app, which is adapted from Singapore’s TraceTogether app, depends on a central datastore. An infected person’s data logs are submitted to the datastore, where they are used by local health authorities to notify anybody whose device has logged a “digital handshake” with the infected person’s device during his or her contagious phase.

This centralised approach to data collection is potentially more vulnerable to hacking, and leaves open the possibility that personal information will be used or shared across government agencies.

Prime minister Scott Morrison has been at pains to emphasise that the data logs used in the government’s proposed app won’t be accessed by federal government agencies. The data is only for state-based health authorities, he says, “not the tax office, not government services, not Centrelink, not Home Affairs, not Department of Education — the Commonwealth will have no access to that data.”

Will the data logs be secure? And can the assurances about data sharing be trusted? A satirical headline this week, “‘Trust Us on Covid App’ Says Government Who Lied about Sports Grants, Water Licences, Travel Expenses, Asylum Seekers, ASIO Leaks and Robodebt,” pretty much sums up the mood.

Against this centralised approach, the international technology community has been advocating what’s known as decentralised privacy-preserving proximity tracing, or DP3T.

To achieve this, a coalition of technologists, epidemiologists and privacy experts have established what is known as a TCN protocol. TCN stands for “telephone contact number,” and it can be used to ensure phones get notifications without any identifiable tracking information being passed on.

Technology giants Apple and Google have come out in favour of the more privacy-enhancing decentralised approach. They’re hoping to encourage this through a new API — essentially the rulebook for how software connects — due for release in May. This will provide a set of new protocols needed for health authorities and governments to publish their own apps via iOS and Android devices.

As well as a more decentralised approach to contact tracing, the API is also expected to modify how Bluetooth-based proximity contact detection actually works.

Currently, Bluetooth can only ping or create “digital handshakes” when a person’s device is not locked. This limits surveillance or location tracking “in the background,” but it also means users need to keep their phones unlocked for any contact-tracing app to work.

The new API will address this issue, allowing digital handshakes to be created even when a person’s phone isn’t in active use. The API will only be available for use by official contact-tracing apps developed by public authorities (the Covid Trace app, for example, developed by ex-Google and Uber engineers, doesn’t qualify). It will help make contact-tracing apps work better, and is also expected to accelerate decentralised data-sharing protocols.

In the meantime, a set of Data Rights for Digital Contact Tracing and Alerting has been published, and work is accelerating in the United States to enable the TCN protocol to be used within open-source contact-tracing apps such as the Private Kit: Safe Paths and Covid Watch.

So, where does this leave the Australian government’s plans? Perhaps because it’s based on a Singapore government model, the app relies too heavily on centralised data collection. We are left to trust Scott Morrison and government services minister Stuart Robert when they argue that the data collected is safe and outside the control of their government. That’s not enough, and won’t help build the trust needed for this app to be effective. At least 40 per cent of the population must opt in to make digital contact tracing effective.

It’s important to remember that our government doesn’t call all the shots here. It appears that plans for digital contact tracing will need to be implemented in the context of the major platforms’ new publishing policies. Much depends on the new API — which highlights how powerful digital-governance protocols are in shaping digital futures.

As we have seen, the majority of Australians are willing to surrender significant freedoms to fight a common enemy. This public health crisis requires a reinvigorated set of principles and protocols that not only protect individual privacy in a digital age but also accelerate the opening up of data platforms and services for the public good.

After all, the internet was built around the principles of decentralised knowledge-sharing in order to advance scientific collaborations. Now is the time for these principles to return to centrestage.

We should at least try to get this right. •

The post Let’s get contact tracing right appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s only got weirder since then, of course, and the walls at home are closing in fast. The dog’s loving it though. Walks are longer and more frequent; he’s got plenty of friends down at the park and social distancing doesn’t appear to be a huge concern for any of them. My son’s loving it too. Nothing focuses a fifteen-year-old boy on what’s important like a school lockout. For him it’s the perfect crime with zero downside: arson minus the fire and the risk. My daughter? Bored. That’s not all that remarkable — she’s twelve and it’s a common refrain among her cohort. She’s been going okay though, hanging out in the kitchen with a friend of hers she’s known since prep. His kitchen’s in San Francisco. He’s bored too.

Given the more pressing problems around, boredom doesn’t qualify as a problem at all. Virus or no virus, it never really has. I don’t know who said it but we’ll struggle for a decent novelist in the future if no one ever gets bored and stares out a window. Perhaps, and if we do what’s being asked of us and stay indoors, we can look forward to some good art coming out of Covid-19. If the artists survive it, that is, which they surely will. If the arts community is familiar with anything it’s the bones of its collective arse. If you need proof of that, try googling “ministry for the arts in Australia.” You’ll end up deep in the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications. There’s an office in there somewhere with Arts on the door. Maybe.

While it’s not only the arts that have been devastated, no other trade has been shut down so swiftly and unceremoniously. Sport dragged its heels in a protracted farce, Crown Casino likewise. Restaurants are hanging by a thread and the best a waiter can hope for is a gig as a delivery driver. But the arts? A couple of weeks ago now a friend who manages a band sent me a text: “Tonight’s our last show for quite a while… last coin for a while too.” This after a period that saw a multitude of benefit gigs across the country for bushfire victims and their communities. Those with shallow pockets have always dug the deepest. No surprises there.

A while ago now, in the interests of mental health and a desire for clear air on matters of public importance, I ditched Facebook. It was a good decision, for me at least. Friends may disagree, though, because now I send rants directly, via text.

Like most, I have an assortment of contacts in my phone: friends, acquaintances, immediate and extended family, work colleagues, professional connections and any number of less intimates. There’s a plumber, a couple of builders and a mechanic, musos, politicos, thespians, academics, workaholics, alcoholics, new-age hippies, office workers, business owners, people I don’t like much, people who don’t like me much, names I don’t recognise. You get the picture. Left, right and all that’s in between.

In equal parts inspiration and irritation, I texted a request for responses to a simple prompt in relation to Covid-19: “I find it curious/amusing that…” The replies came quickly, and the willingness of people to share then, and in the days following, made me regret I’d boxed them in with a such a narrow request and left deeper questions unasked. There isn’t much that’s amusing about Covid-19 after all. Some of them texted just to tell me that.

The general tenor of the responses suggests that Scott Morrison’s been presented with an opportunity to redeem himself after a summer that left many wondering if he was up to the job. For the most part, it has to be said, they’re still wondering. For many, that the prime minister has been only too keen to surround himself with experts in relation to the public health crisis is at stark odds with his inclination to distance himself from people who know a lot about the environmental one. Morrison was also criticised for his “It’s ridiculous, it’s un-Australian and it must stop” rebuke to panic buying: “I find it curious,” texted someone, “that the PM finds it necessary to chastise ‘quiet’ Australians for being rampant market-driven capitalists for buying and selling toilet paper.”

Market-driven capitalism, neoliberalism, whatever you want to call it, came in for sharp critique. As one (now jobless) texter noted, “We have to look long and hard at a system that folds in on itself so spectacularly that it can barely sustain society beyond the loss of a single weekly pay cheque.” The challenge now is that it’s far more monumental than a single pay cheque.

Those in the privileged position of having a job — for now anyway — wonder what type of workplace they’ll be returning to once the virus subsides. At the very least, employers will have a picture of who among their staff works best autonomously, who needs the social setting of an office, and who’s best left at home, free of the nine-to-five factory settings that society mostly just endures because they’re too hard to change.

Massive change, of course, has also hit the education sector. While online education has hung like a Damoclean sword over more traditional forms of teaching and learning for a couple of decades, despite the zeal of its many champions it’s a tough sell, not necessarily because of what it is as much as because of what it isn’t. Anyone who’s been conducting social and work interactions full-time for the past couple of weeks via Zoom, Skype or Facetime will appreciate what is lost. At universities at least, and particularly in arts faculties where a contest of ideas is vital to the pursuit of knowledge and shifting truths, the mooted demise of face-to-face teaching is lamentable. No matter how good sound and video quality is, the virtual classroom is no substitute for being in a room together, in each other’s company, where subtlety, nuance and body language contribute so much to modify behaviour and maintain civility.

Among tales that arrived in my phone of being swept up, or not, in panic-buying melees, there was concern about the rush on egg-laying chooks in the scramble for self-sufficiency. In the not-so-olden days, the minute a chicken stopped producing eggs at a reasonable tempo it ended up in a casserole dish. Stories of headless, bloody chickens chucking laps of the Hills hoist in the backyards of yesteryear are rife among the over-fifties and pretty much all of them involve impossible-to-shift memories of mum and dad tag teaming in the domestic slaughter. Now, your best laying hen’s called Molly or Fluffy and you have adorable photographs of your three-year-old daughter and five-year-old son cuddling her in the backyard. Even if by some miracle you manage to get the idea of Molly’s beheading past the kids, you probably don’t even own a tomahawk, much less the skill or conviction to use it.

I know all this because I have adorable photos of my three-year-old daughter and five-year-old son cuddling Molly, our best laying hen, in the backyard. Molly died of natural causes six years after we last saw an egg. Fluffy, Rusty, Muffy and Twinkle had similarly long and semi-productive lives, which is no small feat given the preponderance of foxes in the suburbs of Melbourne.

The hard lesson from the summer that Scott Morrison only just bumbled his way through is that the public needs and expects good governance in a crisis, and, importantly, when they don’t think you’re up for it, you’ll hear about it long and loud. At the very least they expect the prime minister to be in the country.

In that respect, at least, Morrison is going well. He couldn’t get a flight to Hawaii right now even if he wanted one. In the other? While it’s still early, his stocks appear to be rising. •

The post Fending for ourselves appeared first on Inside Story.

Gmail and I had been working happily together for twenty years. It stores thousands of my bits and pieces in its electronic guts. Nothing exciting, revealing or incriminating; just useful bits and pieces that one refers to from time to time.

Last Wednesday, after an unsuccessful attempt to use the Medibank app on my relatively new iPhone, I got the “Verify it’s you” message when I hit the Gmail icon. Easy: I’ve done it before. Answer the questions, provide your previously lodged alternative email or mobile phone details, wait for a code, enter the code and bingo, you’re back into your account.

But not this time. Having performed the required tasks, I got the dreaded “Account disabled because of suspicious activity” message. Mata Hari no doubt felt the same way when the Sûreté knocked on her door in 1917.

I probed the Gmail beast and found the “Tips to complete account recovery steps” and then the “Why your account recovery request is delayed” page.

It appears that “suspicious activity” is determined by algorithms that also govern your recovery attempts. Get the answer wrong when you’re asked “What was the name of your first teacher?” and you can say goodbye to your account. (Did I tell Gmail long ago that she was “Miss Brown” or just “Brown”? I can’t imagine ever referring to her as “Brown”…)

The official Gmail messages are not clear about what happens to your attempts to recover “disabled” accounts. On the one hand, they suggest that once you have a case number relating to your inquiry, you should wait — three to five days, one page says — for your request to be reviewed.

On the other hand, there’s a suggestion that what’s gone is gone. You won’t see that account again, and the people who are sending mail to it will never know what happened to you. The gas and electricity companies, and all the others, won’t be able to send electronic condolences to your digital funeral. They’ll never know.

That’s the official Gmail line: be patient, there may be hope, but perhaps not much.

The news gets worse, however, when you find user-group sites on the web and enter a world of broken dreams. The begging messages, sent fruitlessly into cyberspace, cry for mercy: “Please, please, won’t somebody at Google help me. I need this account for my exams/rent/medicine.” “Without logging in to that email… I can’t work,” writes another pilgrim on this vale of tears. “I will soon be going hungry.”

Because Gmail is a “free service” (we pay by sowing our data for digital combine harvesters to mow through like wheatfields in the Wimmera), Gmail owes us nothing. There’s no helpline leading to nice young women in Manila. Or good guys in Gurgaon who can sometimes be lured into abandoning their I’m-John-how-can-I-help-you personas to discuss Virat Kohli and fix your problem.

The clearest description I’ve found of my Gmail doomsday comes from Ron Miller, a techie journalist, who had his account blocked in early December 2017. He got it back three weeks later after constantly harassing a public relations contact at Google. “Without special contacts like I had because of my job,” he wrote, “you are out in the cold.” In a later piece he gave a couple of suggestions about how to get an account unlocked, but neither worked for me.

The advice varies on what to do while you wait to see whether the algorithms will be merciful. One school says keep attempting to get into the account. Let them know you care. Another school says don’t try too often or the algorithms will get angry and block you as a digital nuisance.

There are hints that somewhere there may be human beings. One optimist says that if you get a registration number for your request for review that means you are in a queue and, somewhere, life forms are looking at your case. They will, the optimist believes, eventually see that your account is as innocent of “suspicious activity” as a newborn cyber lamb. They’ll free it to gambol again in cyberspace.

Can a person protect against Gmail doomsday? I’ve seen no suggestions, other than to stay away from Gmail and find other providers. Your security questions, backup email addresses and mobile phone numbers are no protection once the algorithms target you. And there’s no way, either, of informing your correspondents that their messages are not reaching you.

So I wait, prodding Gmail every day or so in the most polite way so that the algorithms won’t get cross.

And I’m also being especially nice to our postman. He, at least, has never held back my copy of RoyalAuto for suspicious activity. •

Postscript: Yes, Virginia, there is a Google Claus

Twenty-five days after I wrote this article, Google Claus guided his digital reindeer into my computer and gave me back the Gmail account that dark, algorithmic forces had locked away.

As you’ll know from the article above, my longstanding Gmail account had suddenly told me it was locked for my own protection because “suspicious activity” had been detected. Thousands of useful bits and pieces, lazily left by me in Gmail messages, were now beyond my shaky grasp.

So, every night for twenty-four days I muttered incantations and went through the designated routine to restore a locked account. I’d tax myself on how I had answered the Google security question. Did I say Miss Brown, my Grade 1 teacher, was my first teacher? Or Miss Black, my kindergarten teacher?

Then, on the twenty-fifth day, with hope almost gone, I went through the nightly routine, using Miss Black from kindergarten and an old password. And there it was. The reindeer had landed! There was even a message signed by Lily at the Google Accounts Team.

The moral of the story is that if this happens to you, do not despair. Persevere. And before the worst happens, check your security questions, backup email address and phone details.

There are small pluses with a visit from Google Claus. You don’t need to clean the chimney, and he doesn’t need milk and cookies left out for him. Any cookies will be digital, and of course they’ll be left by him. •

The post Gmail’s trial by ordeal appeared first on Inside Story.

This response — criticised for essentially kicking the can down the road — says a lot about the complicated politics surrounding the ACCC’s forthright assessment of the digital environment.

The ACCC inquiry emerged from the horse-trading in the lead-up to the relaxation of Australia’s media ownership laws in 2017. The context meant that many industry participants assumed the ACCC would focus on the regulatory and commercial imbalances between news publishers and multinational platforms.

Industry events during the inquiry tended to reflect that view. ACCC chair Rod Sims and deputy chair Delia Rickard made frequent speeches critiquing the business practices of the digital platforms and their reluctance to embrace regulation. Encouraged by these public statements, the media industry expected substantive recommendations supporting their commercial interests.

But from the beginning there were signs that the ACCC interpreted its role more broadly. As Sims explained in a November 2017 speech, the commission mainly intended to investigate the state of competition in online media markets and assess whether online consumers were protected from an over-concentration of operators.

This difference in approach can partly be explained by the ACCC’s statutory focus on competition and consumer issues and partly by the breadth of the inquiry’s terms of reference, which didn’t so much ask “How can we save journalism?” as “How is money made through digital media and who benefits?” So, while the inquiry continued to commission studies on news media, the ACCC had less and less to say about journalism as it went on.

The final report makes it clear that the ACCC will not save journalism. Few of its recommendations offer direct panaceas, with the most practical one requiring digital platforms and news publishers to establish a voluntary code of conduct. The government accepted this recommendation and has asked the ACCC to begin negotiations with the major players. And the implementation process has teeth, with government stating that a mandatory code will be imposed on parties if a voluntary code can’t be finalised by October 2020.

The other recommendations targeting journalism are not substantially innovative, essentially asking the government to keep funding public broadcasting and maintain its grants package supporting small and regional publishers. The future of commercial news media looks like it will be decided by market forces and private ordering through a co-regulatory approach.

With the future of public interest journalism at stake, this limited intervention could be viewed as a worrying sign. But Australia already has important measures in place. Faced with the economic collapse of digital journalism and the emergence of regional news deserts, media industry commentators in the United States have been calling for the creation of national public service media organisations. Here, governments created the ABC and SBS many decades ago.

It is also important to note that the state of the news media might be a sign of transformation rather than death. New entrants include the Saturday Paper, and Crikey launched a team of investigative journalists (Crikey Inq) last year. Social news outlets such as Junkee have matured, and international organisations like the Guardian and the New York Times are investing significant resources in local editions.

This is not to play down the fact that the Australian media market faces major challenges. But these new outlets are positive signs of market innovation and transformation. Newer entrants are no longer attempting to copy the mass media format of the past, instead providing niche news offerings that target specific demographics. They are also lightly staffed. Junkee has about sixty employees and the Guardian Australia around fifty. The news media may become a smaller business but one that is more focused on the core role of public interest journalism.

So, while the ACCC’s final report criticises digital platforms extensively, its recommendations represent only small wins for news organisations. The ACCC has largely focused on the risks associated with digital platforms — concentrated online markets, a lack of competition in online advertising, and privacy concerns — and proposes a range of reforms in response, encompassing proposed wholesale reforms of media policy and privacy law and amendments relating to copyright enforcement and mergers.

This is an incredibly important outcome for the public, but the ACCC’s focus means that no stakeholders are wildly enthusiastic. Indeed, the submissions to Treasury as part of the final consultation process reveal that both the platforms and the publishers are trying to apply some brakes to the policy process. The platforms have continued their push against the threat of regulatory burdens, and the publishers now realise that the ACCC was never completely in their corner.

An ongoing review of media regulation means that newspapers must once again justify the self-regulation of the press in an age of convergent media. Publishers have never been strong supporters of privacy law reforms and are especially hostile to the oft-raised proposal to introduce a statutory right to privacy.

Although various ministers have said that Australia won’t be afraid to regulate the platforms as required, the ACCC has given the federal government a difficult hand to play by sketching out major reforms across multiple domains. The government has taken bold steps in some areas, asking the ACCC to launch a further inquiry into the ad-tech sector, which Google dominates, and ensuring that a code of conduct between publishers and platforms is implemented. But action on most recommendations has been delayed subject to further consultation.

This policy détente is perhaps no surprise. The media and content industries have never been afraid to criticise ministers and policymakers when reforms to privacy, copyright or media regulation have been canvassed, and technology companies are learning to become formidable lobbyists outside Washington, D.C. During the debate about whether they should be forced to reveal the contents of encrypted messages, tech companies appeared uncertain about how to navigate Australian politics, but that seemed to change, with the Saturday Paper reporting that that senior executives from the United States were present in Canberra during the final lobbying push.

Australia can’t avoid reforms in the way it regulates these technologies. But the Coalition can buy itself time while it takes stock of the changing landscape. The extension of the original inquiry for a further five years forms part of this broader strategy.

The reaction to some of the ACCC’s key recommendations also points to one of the stranger outcomes of the inquiry. Platforms and publishers are largely opposing parties and will continue to clash over any proposed amendments to copyright and merger laws. But their interests may converge around privacy law and media regulation. Privacy reforms would be seen as a threat to the data-based business models of platforms and the investigatory capacities of the news media and both parties would push back strongly against media reforms that increase their regulatory burdens. But change in both of these areas is needed, with Australians now stuck with complicated and increasingly dated regulatory frameworks.

With both groups of commercial stakeholders starting to resist reform in certain areas, it is understandable that new legislation hasn’t been forthcoming. Australia had a chance to lead the world in the implementation of major policy frameworks responding to the new digital environment. Instead, the government has taken a gradual approach. This should allow it to carefully navigate the concerns of commercial actors, stay informed through the ongoing ACCC reviews and follow international regulatory trends. At a certain point, though, it will have to abandon its caution and take a stance. Consultation can only take the government so far, and at certain points the intersecting agendas of platforms and publishers may work directly against the prospect of much-needed regulatory reform. •

The post Publishers, platforms and policy détente appeared first on Inside Story.

Stories about how facial recognition is being used by law enforcement aren’t that surprising these days. But the Clearview AI revelations, published by the New York Times, made the tech industry sit up. Here was a company that, even in a world of increasingly invasive facial recognition applications, had crossed a line. It scraped the open web, collected billions of photos of people, and built an app enabling users to match their own pictures of a person with the photos in that vast database, with links to pages on the web where those photos appeared.

This kind of application — breathtaking in scale, deeply invasive in implementation — has long been technically possible; it just wasn’t something technology companies were keen to do (or at least, to be seen as doing).

Up until recently, conversations about facial recognition technology haven’t usually gone much further than whether we should or shouldn’t ban it. There has been no middle ground. Supporters are on the side of law and order, whatever that takes; opponents are radical leftists with a disregard for public safety or luddites opposed to technological progress. The many different choices made in designing and deploying the various tools and methods that fall under the umbrella of “facial recognition” — some of them sensible, others careless, some downright ugly — tend to get lost along the way.

Many things are technically possible. That doesn’t make them safe, ethical or useful. It is technically possible to build a three-wheeled car. It just might keel over if you go round a bend at more than forty kilometres per hour. It’s technically possible to manipulate software measuring carbon emissions in a car so that readings are artificially lowered, but that doesn’t mean it’s legally or socially permissible.

Technologies are not monolithic. The design of every product rests on a range of choices and trade-offs. Some products are well designed and conscious of their social and ecological footprints. Other products pose threats to physical safety, discriminate against people, or are designed to cheat. We need to think carefully about how we want technology to be applied — how we want it to be manifested in the world. Facial recognition is no different.

Clearview AI’s facial recognition application wasn’t just bad because it scraped billions of images of people without their knowledge or consent. If details of the New York Times’s investigation are true, it went a lot further than that. It built software capable of monitoring whom its users — mostly law enforcement agencies — were searching for. It manipulated image search results, and removed some matches. Images uploaded by police were stored on their own servers, with little verification of data security.

Are these things we want? Are these practices okay?

Clearview AI is just the latest in a long line of stories about buggy, inaccurate, invasive and outright offensive implementations of facial recognition. Face-detection settings on cameras that only work on certain faces. Image-tagging software making racist comparisons. Identity-matching databases used to investigate crime consistently misidentifying members of already marginalised groups. Software engineers matching women’s faces with adult videos online, to help men check if their girlfriends had ever acted in porn.

Last week European Union regulators indicated they’re considering a potential ban on facial recognition technology for up to five years — with some exceptions — while they figure out the technology’s impact and the regulatory issues that need to be tackled. Google and Facebook have already expressed cautious support for such a ban.

Some cities have already started curtailing facial recognition: in San Francisco, the government voted in 2019 to ban local law enforcement from using the technology. In New York State, the education department demanded a school district cease using the technology in public schools.

Speaking to the New York Times, one investor in Clearview AI, David Scalzo, was doubtful about the power of any prohibition. Technology can’t be banned, he said. “It might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”

It’s true that a technology, once discovered, can’t be undiscovered (though some have been forgotten). But throughout history, societies have temporarily banned the development or certain applications of technologies when it’s unclear whether they will do more harm than good: think nuclear power, or gene editing. Sometimes temporary bans become permanent ones. Sometimes they’re lifted once we’ve used the breathing space to figure out the rules of engagement.

And yes, it’s true that bans can be broken. But technologies don’t break bans — people do. People who do not respect or recognise the concerns of the societies they live in.

Technologies do not lead us into a dystopian future: we decide the future we want. •

The post Will we finally look clearly at facial recognition technology? appeared first on Inside Story.

I wait seven minutes before the car arrives. My driver this time is Australian-born, and we get chatting pretty quickly. I learn he’s driving Ubers on the side while doing his MBA. While we talk, we also negotiate with the digital map that lurks on the dashboard, giving us instructions on where to go. I have my own favourite routes through the local streets that get me to Sydney’s airport, but the map, fed by data obtained from all of us going about our daily business, has its own ideas.

I tell my driver about a photographer friend of mine, also an Uber driver on the side, who likes to run two versions of Google maps when he’s driving, one within the Uber app and one straight from Google. My friend says the Uber route is just slightly longer, and therefore more expensive, most of the time. That seems hard to be believe, my driver told me, but yeah, maybe.

My driver and I get to talking about Uber’s opening up to public shareholders earlier this year, which saw the company attract a lower sharemarket price than was anticipated, mostly because of revelations by the company that it was struggling to make a profit from ride-sharing. My driver was pretty well informed about all this. “For Uber, long term, it’s about the data, not the ride-sharing,” he explained to me, not knowing quite how obsessed I was with the company myself, and with the rise of data-driven urban platforms more generally. I nodded and agreed. Yep, it’s all about the data.

We’d probably been reading similar stories about Uber in the news recently. Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive, seems to be running a PR campaign about the company’s ambitions to become the “broker of human movement” — specifically, of “people, food, and freight” — in cities. Kind of like the Amazon of transportation, he has been saying. When it was first launched, Uber created a new marketplace for ride-sharing by better connecting people who needed a lift somewhere with people who could trade some, or most, of their spare time for extra money. Uber Eats, launched in 2012, has likewise provided a simple way for people to order takeaway food, by connecting these people with others in their city who would happily deliver it to them for a small fee without having to be tied to one particular restaurant. Uber Freight is coming too, an app that “matches carriers with shippers” in a way that presumably will aim to beat systems people use now to get their freight where it needs to be.

For Uber, creating a technology platform to improve human movement was more a way to grow a company quickly — really quickly, faster than any company before.

I wonder aloud, to my driver, what kind of “broker” of human movement Uber is. Is it really so “data-driven’? Isn’t this still, really, about human capital, and how it’s being put to use? Uber spends a lot of money on incentivising drivers, “shippers” and food deliverers to use its platform to generate their own income, perhaps swapping what they’re already doing for this gig, or perhaps squeezing it into their spare time to make some extra cash. The amount of money Uber spends on marketing and user incentives is why they don’t yet make money on their ride-sharing business, despite the considerable fees they charge drivers, food deliverers and restaurants to use the platform. Being big, being part of more and more urban interactions taking place across every city around the world, is what matters most here. I put it to my Uber driver: Isn’t that just classic rent-seeking behaviour?

The difference here is the data, he explains to me. He says “dayta,” like an American, not “darta” like most Australians. You can’t work in tech or business these days and get away with “darta.” Uber can make all kinds of uses of the dayta created by users — which means, he explains, their brokerage service is not non-productive, in that classic rent-seeking sense. They’ve accelerated into self-driving cars, and they can also use all that dayta they’re generating to capture a granular sense of how cities really work.

Yes yes, that dayta.

It’s one of those conversations that pokes around some big topics, but won’t jump fully in. My Uber driver and I know we’re only going to be speaking for a few more fleeting moments before I jump out of the car with a cheery goodbye, trying not to slam the door too hard lest I damage my rider rating. Good luck with everything! I say.

Once out of the car, the Uber app hits me with a rating request. How was your ride today? I enthusiastically tap on the five-star option, and choose “Great conversation” to describe why my trip was so great.

The experience I’ve just recounted is not quite true — it’s more an amalgam of many different Uber trips I’ve taken over the past few years, and the conversations I tend to strike up with drivers. During much of Uber’s life in Australian cities, I’ve been reflecting on how platforms of this kind have been affecting the way we live in cities together.

Despite all kinds of misgivings about the kind of company Uber is — a massive, US-based outfit that fleeces the very people it seeks to “partner” with to sell its technology, and puts taxi drivers like my neighbour out of a job — I’ve become fascinated by the kinds of interactions it and similar companies have introduced.

There’s a sense of heightened sociability between strangers that seems to occur, perhaps because we’re protected by that threat of algorithmic-generated banishment if either party takes a misstep. Or maybe it’s the kind of people who have been quick to take up Uber as a transport option. As an iconic company of the “gig economy,” Uber often attracts people who aren’t looking to drive cars for the rest of their lives — which means you get to chat with people like my Uber driver, who also happened to be studying for an MBA and thinking about the future of data platforms.

The translation of myriad kinds of urban interaction into data points for more sales is what attracts the brightest and the wealthiest to thinking about all kinds of new ideas for Australian cities.

Uber is also, in many senses, the realisation of a quite radical idea advocated for many years by sustainability planners. What if we could get people to stop thinking of transport through the lens of the privately held motor vehicle and instead encourage people to share their driving experience? Couldn’t this cut the number of cars on the road, and free up space for other kinds of uses?

Like the car-sharing company GoGet, founded by sustainability advocate Bruce Jeffreys, Uber advocated its way into our cities as an innovative way to get people to move around them differently. Assets once considered purely private could become shared resources. Instead of ownership being the goal, we could reduce consumption and shift towards an economy based on access.

Apart from GoGet, these companies haven’t focused on creating cities that use fewer of the planet’s scarce resources. For Uber, creating a technology platform to improve human movement was more a way to grow a company quickly — really quickly, faster than any company before, generating huge benefits for its business leaders, investors, and shareholders.

For a company like Uber, the future of cities, and how we live in them, is primarily about the possibility that digital infrastructure built today will stick around as a foundational platform for future generations, in cities all around the world, to use as their first choice. Time to go to the airport? Better Uber it. Getting people around the world to use your company name as a verb to describe some of the most basic things we do in cities is, really, the ultimate, multi-billion-dollar goal. Want to know where you’re going? Better Google it.

Those who think about cities and digital innovation are often people like my Uber driver, busy coming up with start-up business ideas in this brave new world of tech-driven urban interaction. Many, it seems, focus their minds on new ways to do takeaway food. After all, people are time poor, but they also need to eat. Why not better service the needs of those who not only lack the time or wherewithal to cook, but would also prefer not to have to actually go fetch their order?

The success of digital food delivery apps has probably caught your attention. Australia is, it seems, becoming “an Uber Eats nation,” as one journalist puts it, with online food delivery services now worth 12 per cent of all sales in the $44 billion cafe, restaurant and takeaway food industry, and one in three adults living in Australian cities reporting use of food delivery apps.

No wonder, then, that moving around our major cities now seems to involve a lot of interaction with bike-riders carrying large square boxes of food to the time-poor customers. A relative of mine has told me that university campuses, like University of Sydney and UNSW, are hotspots for these delivery services, as many overseas students prefer the ease of using an app to order their lunches rather than having to negotiate campus food options.

Australian digital entrepreneurs are hoping to cash in on the trend. Two founders of a company called Kloopr have created an app that allows anyone travelling from point A to point B to become a delivery driver. Just think: you might be able to earn a bit of money on your way home, just by checking if one of your neighbours has ordered take-out. Others, like Bring Me Home, let you buy and pick up discounted surplus food from nearby cafes, restaurants, bakeries, groceries and supermarkets. This company is targeting Australia’s food waste problem in a way that’s also attractive to those who would prefer not to cook tonight or go out.

In other words, today’s digital platforms have made Australian cities attract spaces for disruptive new ideas about how to connect people differently. Most Australian citizens are now equipped with their own GPS receiver, bundled into the shiny, glowing, advanced computational device they carry around with them everywhere, otherwise known as the smartphone. On that phone are likely to be abundant maps, apps, recording devices, listening devices, maybe fitness trackers, maybe also air quality monitors. The phone many of us are carrying with us may also be listening to us in various kinds of ways — whether through the tiny microphones used to listen in on conversations (who knew?!), or by “listening” in the sense of analysing the information we churn through as we go about our daily business.

The translation of myriad kinds of urban interaction into data points for more sales is what attracts the brightest and the wealthiest to thinking about all kinds of new ideas for Australian cities. How can all this information be used to build new businesses, sell more, but also make our cities “smarter,” more responsive to infrastructural breakdowns, “closing the loop” between human interaction (or malfunction), infrastructure, services, and utilities?

Those people who come up with the best and brightest ideas for using data to make Australian cities work better are showered with investment money to help them scale as fast as possible. One such company, Neighbourlytics, offers “the data you need, to create cities people love.” Founded by two Australian women, this urban platform offers “simple ways to collect and understand rich digital data about what makes places thrive” by using social media data to capture community sentiment about a place. It’s particularly useful for real estate companies and city leaders who want to “see places through local’s eyes.”

Countless other digital platforms are also vying to change how we learn about, manage, govern, experience, connect and interact with each other in cities. For each, it is the data — the dayta — that drives innovation and new ideas about Australian cities. If data is the new oil, cities are the new goldmines, ripe for data-mining machine-learning, behavioural nudging and, ultimately, value-extraction.

Many who work in urban tech these days tend to think the possibilities offered by information technology are quite new. This, like my Uber story, is only partially true. Certainly, all the computational innovations that underpin our digitally mediated experience of cities today are new. But, at the same time, this way of seeing cities has its own peculiar history. In previous decades, it was spurred on by ideas from cybernetics, emboldened by the potential of clever “counting machines” to decode the complex webs of interaction that make up a city.

Will lots of things be missed? Historian Hugh Stretton. University of Adelaide

Despite their novel techniques, many urbanists railed against these computer-mediated visions, not because they weren’t passionate about better understanding complex urban problems, but because they worried what kind of city this way of seeing would bring into focus.

One such worrier was the Australian urbanist and historian Hugh Stretton. Paying close attention to the relationships between urban form, urban marketplaces and diverse urban sociality, Stretton was ambivalent about the use of “information” as a lens through which to understand Australian cities. In his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, now half a century old, he reflected on what he described as a kind of urban “ideology” that looked to create objective measures of urbanity to plan and manage Australian cities. He wrote:

What are cities, essentially? They are systems of intense, hyper-efficient interaction. Interaction is quintessentially the transmission, reception and exchange of information. The basic unit of information is the simple clause or image, the “bit.” The basic unit of interaction is the transmission of one bit from one human to another. Call this basic transaction a “hubit.” Private, face-to-face hubits are not countable. But the public channels of communication are all metered, one way or another. Count the hubits they carry. Weight them for distance carried. Divide by time and population, and you have indexed the intensity of interaction. Indeed, you are on the way to a universal, abstract and reliable measure of urbanity, and a general theory of it. You also have a political program: to maximise urbanity.

Stretton saw problems in this way of seeing cities. It proposed that they could best be understood through the lens of science, specifically “systems analyses” that used mathematical methods to understand and manage things like traffic flows. These were fine, in some instances, but shouldn’t be used as the basis from which to understand other things about cities. The risk, as Stretton saw it, was that only some things would get counted. If cities are intense interaction systems, the kinds of interactions we would pay most attention to might end up being those that could be counted most easily. Lots of things might be left out:

Making love is an interaction; so is a business deal or a visit to the doctor or a sparkling conversation about art in somebody’s salon; so is every jostle on a crowded pavement, every bit of unwanted commercial soliciting, every exchange of complaints about the noise or pollution or segregation of the city; so is every eviction, extortion, blackmail threat, sale of dope, or crime of violence in the city.

In this way, as Stretton put it, “Objectivity begets its own politics.” Certain kinds of interaction may grab most of the attention, simply because they can be counted, and the counting of them becomes beneficial to some parts of society, but not others. So, to Stretton, here was the basis of a political program: “to maximise urbanity.”

To many of today’s urbanists, who look to the potentials of “smart cities” and data-driven methods of managing infrastructure and service provision, Hugh Stretton’s cantankerous views might feel a bit old-fashioned. Certainly, Ideas for Australian Cities is not easy to find (I had to borrow my father’s copy in order to re-read it for its coming anniversary). His reflections on information and urban science, in a chapter called “Ideology,” are tucked away in chapter six, after a series of quite quotidian reflections on the strengths of mid-sized Australian cities like Adelaide and Canberra.

And yet, re-reading his critical reflections on what we might call urban informationism today, Stretton’s writing feels urgent, and altogether necessary. With a wave of urban apps hitting the streets, encouraging us to stay home, watch Netflix, stay away from restaurants, and keep swiping, we’d do well to remember that all this data we’re producing, through our myriad ways of interacting digitally, may benefit particular ways of being “urban.”

Even if they are mightily convenient, these services may, in the end, not be in our best interests. During these years I’ve spent observing and writing about this new wave of “urban apptivism,” I’ve noticed how many of the best, most responsive digital platforms are those built by technology companies that have access to very large amounts of user interaction data. And they like certain kinds of interaction over others.

Take Uber. Over fourteen million trips occur on Uber’s platform each day, by people like me and my MBA student, who Uber counts as a “driver partner” of the company, a “micro-entrepreneur” out to hustle. Uber likes our transaction to be considered a mutually beneficial transaction between two individuals in a marketplace — not a service delivered by a global multinational company. The user experience Uber offers us is also unparalleled among Australian taxi apps — no surprise, considering the $22 billion in investor finance ploughed into Uber over the past decade.

As Uber extends its muscle into the hospitality business, Australian restauranteurs are now experiencing something akin to what Australian news media outlets have gone through, in the wake of Google and Facebook, recently the subject of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platforms inquiry. They are finding their capacity to reach customers increasingly depends on nifty apps, which have figured out how to connect buyers and sellers, or readers and writers, in highly location-aware, responsive and “human-centred” ways.

With teams of global developers working to ensure the best user-interaction experience possible, it’s not surprising Australians love these apps. An ex-Google employee compares them to casino slot machines. With all this swiping going on, the data exhaust of our urban lives can in turn be ploughed into creating new, cleverer ways of interacting with each other. Like Stretton said: this is a program to “maximise urbanity” — except it’s an urbanity that amplifies the intelligence of machine-learning systems but doesn’t care much about our high streets, so long as we’re all interacting.

When I re-read Stretton today, I can’t help but wonder: who is championing our cities with these ideas in mind? His Ideas for Australian Cities influenced a generation of urban planners and policy-makers, including people like Tom Uren, who led bold interventions on behalf of the federal government to protect and champion particular mixed-use precincts in cities like Sydney, Fremantle and Hobart. This wasn’t anti-development, it was strategic intervention to protect what worked best.

Today’s cities likewise need a strategic government intervention to better shape their data infrastructures. Specifically, we need a new deal on city data, to ensure urban digital innovation doesn’t also mean digital feudalism.

And if Australian cities are going to be hotbeds of data-driven innovation, we would do well to remember Stretton’s cautionary words. To remember to cherish that which can’t be counted as possibly among the very best things that make our places thrive. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post You, me, data and the city appeared first on Inside Story.

As they prepare to set off from the town square, Lee is accosted by a resident, Jennifer Barker, who coolly lambasts him as a racist and misogynist given to “whipping up prejudice.” He is also shown making a furtive call warning Steve, the constituent he plans to doorstep, not to let the visitor from London know they’re pals. When the clumsy ruse dissolves, the ex-pitman’s “you’ve killed my career” feels unfazed, as if he’s quite enjoying the attention. In context, Crick’s endnote is a touch ponderous: “A lesson to us, journalists and viewers, that in this world of fake news, we should be a little more sceptical about what we see on screen.”

Ashfielders are blunt, the kind of trait that a media presence tends to amplify. Labour candidate Natalie Fleet tells the Economist of a male constituent who raged against her party’s votes-at-sixteen policy. I was a mother at that age, said Natalie. “Well, you should have kept your legs closed.” “Well, you can fuck off.” A vote lost, then? Not necessarily. Ashfield is “perhaps the strangest seat in Britain, with enough characters and subplots to fill a political soap opera,” says the newspaper. The seat’s three-way contest, with the insurgent Ashfield Independents also pitching to overturn Labour’s 441 majority in 2017, lures party strategists and media outlets alike.

Around a hundred near-marginals, out of 650 first-past-the-post races, will decide the colour of the next parliament. The most competitive include historic Canterbury, where a student vote helped Labour take the 185-year Conservative bastion by, yes, 185 votes in 2017; Crewe & Nantwich in the northwest, which Labour snatched by forty-eight; and North-East Fife, where a Scots nationalist is defending a two-vote margin from Liberal Democrat and Tory contenders.

In England, whispers of volatility reach to Workington in the far northwest, with its 3925 Labour majority. Were the Conservatives to win coastal Cumbria’s ex-mining redoubt, a few miles and a world away from the famed Lake District’s western fringe, a renewal of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street tenure would be assured. Indeed, this campaign kicked off with a flurry over “Workington Man,” distant offspring of 1990’s (Thatcherite) Essex Man and 2001’s (New Labour) Worcester Woman as a London politico’s idea of the must-have voter. Today’s version — according to Onward, a centre-right “ideas factory” — is a middle-aged grafter, fan of rugby league and Brexit, now notionally ready, like his peers in similarly neglected towns, to junk Labour red for Conservative blue.

This newly identified beast was soon being avidly scouted by journos in search of earthy wisdom, then just as quickly discarded until the post-election inquests. But the passing frenzy served to focus attention on a churning electoral market, in which voters’ greater readiness to shop around intersects in unpredictable ways with Brexit’s effect of polarising much of the electorate into “leave” and “remain” camps. The British Election Study finds that 49 per cent of voters didn’t vote for same party across the general elections of 2010, 2015, and 2017. Two years ago, 40 per cent of Labour’s voters switched to the party during Jeremy Corbyn’s vigorous campaign.

Such volatility makes for caution about the result tomorrow. Both 2015’s Conservative majority and 2017’s hung parliament came as exit-poll stunners at 10pm on election night. Most projections this time veer between those two outcomes. Current indicators — a Tory squeeze of the upstart Brexit Party to reach 42–43 per cent of vote share, a Labour creep to 33–34 per cent at LibDem expense, and the Scottish National Party’s guaranteed forty or so seats — could produce either. On election eve, YouGov’s vaunted MRP model projects an overall Conservative majority of twenty-eight, down from sixty-eight a fortnight ago.

Much depends on how strong Labour’s northern “red wall” proves to be, and how vulnerable southern Tory seats are to the anti-Brexit LibDems. Amid larger uncertainty, those local jousts and regional swings will be pivotal. So will variable weather on a deep-winter, pre-Christmas Thursday, which may affect turnout. This time, excuses for defeat might well be more entertaining than the election has been.

The campaign has had a bad press. Boring, joyless, dire, empty and depressing, say many commentators. Sheer length underlies the mood: after a pretend war lasting months, a few weeks of round-the-clock airtime for yet more repetitive hyperbole can hardly create a spark. Brexit’s unrelieved four years, and politics’ banal colonisation of every crevice of public life, add to the mix. What else should be expected?

Especially so, given that fragmentation now extends as much to election campaigning as to the political system, its parties, and the United Kingdom itself. The comforting surface of leaflets and rallies, head-to-heads and vox pops is reduced ever more to a palliative, while unseen marshals deploy much sharper tools of viral grooming — attack ads, rousing videos, targeted messages — to hustle key demographics towards the voting booth. No wonder modern elections feel so elusive, in a Kundera-like “life is elsewhere” sort of way, and to many, so frustrating.

Michael Crick himself observes “almost a conspiracy between politicians and journalists to pretend there is a vibrant contest on the ground. In reality, most voters have no personal contact from candidates beyond a few leaflets. That seems true even in many marginal seats.” What’s left of elections is a wall of noise: both ubiquitous and ungraspable.

But lay aside expectations, and the imprint of this deep background is tangible. The Tory high command is haunted by 2017, when a dud leader and stuffed manifesto led to a calamitous victory. This time, a risk-averse Conservative document has helped shield a distrusted Boris Johnson from close policy scrutiny and allow him space to bore “get Brexit done” into every voter’s skull. At headquarters, Isaac Levido and his Kiwi partners Sean Topham and Ben Guerin — credited with Scott Morrison’s win in May — lead an agile online strategy of experimental provocation, pithy sloganeering and constant rebuttal. Move fast and shake things, give Boris his lines, and let his presence do the rest: it’s not pretty but it is coherent.

By contrast, Labour’s sense of its near miss last time has prompted a straight remix at even higher volume. The proposed state control of capitalism, its £83 billion (A$161 billion) starter cost to be conjured up by taxes on high earners, runs with the grain both of Jeremy Corbyn’s lifelong ideology and his makeover of the party since 2015. That brings a catch: his often-popular ideas are sold with vengeful rhetoric that lifts believers but worries the unattached. This matters more as Corbyn himself is both better known than in 2017 and anathema even for many traditional Labour supporters. The ten leadership approval polls since mid November, gathered by five companies, have given him an average net rating of –39.5 per cent, against Johnson’s –5.3 per cent.

For all their flaws, Johnson and Corbyn have been their party’s undisputed figureheads in interviews, staged workplace or hospital visits, and at gatherings of the faithful. The prime minister often seemed distracted, the opposition leader flat. The whole circus’s robotic air and want of electricity again suggested, for all the accompanying hype, a backroom script. True, the BBC’s half-hour studio debate, after a dismal one on ITV, offered a good contrast between Corbyn’s lucid if formulaic droning, honed by decades of all-purpose platform speeches with no stopwatch, and Johnson’s digressive burbling, a hit-and-miss procession of forays and darts that equally eludes skewering. Jellyfish met butterfly, the result — despite the ludicrous avidity of rival post-match “spin room” teams — a tie.

The Boris–Jeremy duopoly sucked up much of the TV oxygen, and made the contest look heavily male. Still, the LibDems’ Jo Swinson — hyperactive, green, feminist and Europhile, like her party — contrived to miss the breakthrough bus. Her initial branding as “next prime minister” was absurd, her promise to cancel Brexit by fiat (“let’s make all this go away” in the ineffable words of her brief rival Layla Moran) felt undemocratic even to many remainers. Swinson’s own average poll rating is –24.5 per cent. But if the party over-promised, its energetic focus on target seats could garner high-profile Tory scalps such as foreign secretary Dominic Raab.

Adding lustre to the LibDems are the smooth Chuka Umunna and the dauntless Luciana Berger, ex-Labour centrists and Corbyn critics, and the ex-Tory rising star Sam Gyimah, all now standing in Tory-held London marginals. The first two reached the LibDems via the short-lived Independent Group (created in February, an aeon ago in British politics). Berger’s experience of sustained anti-Semitism in Corbyn’s party, a scourge whose scale and depths are still being uncovered, is echoed by many others in a party once seen as British Jews’ primary political home. Their fear of a Corbyn premiership is real.

For their part, ex-Tories standing as independents, such as Dominic Grieve, are backed by grandees from the 1980s and 90s — John Major, Michael Heseltine, Chris Patten — whose raging embitterment against Brexit and Johnson, reminiscent of postwar empire loyalists, is accorded reverence on the BBC. On the Labour side, Gordon Brown, an addictive thunderer of doom, similarly resembles a lost soul from a distant era. Of this caste, Tony Blair alone retains the capacity to make an actual argument about Britain and Europe now, misguided though his call for a hung parliament is. (Juliet Samuel, who sees politicians’ abandonment of responsibility as today’s fulcrum, writes in a brilliant column: “Rather than defending liberal democracy, a hung parliament would only endanger it more.”) Nonetheless, given the self-inflicted wreckage of the more demented remainers, Blair’s relative sanity could still be influential.

If the above broadcasting reference is not gratuitous, it’s because the shallowness of much political coverage may become unignorable after the election. The best of BBC journalism is excellent, but is submerged in a trivialising and patronising sea. To be fair, the networks’ problems overlap with those of politics as a whole, with both sides now existing in the shadow of voracious social media and spending most of their energies trying desperately to keep up. That dynamic visibly turns fine journos, and mediocre politicians, into manic puppets.

Some impresarios of the bearpit, on BBC and C4 in particular, but also ITN and Sky, now act less as public-service journalists than as squall merchants for social media. A gleaming exception is Andrew Neil, ex-Sunday Times editor turned incisive BBC interviewer, who above all works for his supper and thus allows the viewer-citizen to share it (in both old and new senses). His granular, relentless dissections of Corbyn’s economic illiteracy and of Nicola Sturgeon’s abysmal record as Scotland’s first minister were joyous in great part for being unheard of — and this after the two leaders’ four and five years in charge — but mainly for the quasi-dissident thrill of “Blimey, is this allowed before the watershed?!”

Neil didn’t net the butterfly, however, for Johnson avoided his show with lame dissembling. The interrogator then, after a studied demolition of Nigel Farage, challenged the PM direct to camera on this “question of trust.” It was a huge viral hit, and no more. Johnson’s evasion looked cowardly, though the shoddy snub may also reflect his notable obedience to the Tory campaign playbook. In turn, Michael Grade, respected former TV executive, responded that Neil’s reaction “crosses a line” of impartiality, and went on to criticise his and C4’s “empty chairing” of politicians who decline to appear. “Neither the BBC nor ITN [which supplies C4] is Fox News — yet.”

If modern politics lives ever in the moment, this election is no exception. Its disruptive events are already consigned to the great churning maw — flooding in Yorkshire, an Islamist atrocity, Trump’s presence at a nervous NATO summit — though Johnson’s “empathy bypass” (© Jo Swinson) on Monday when shown a distressing hospital photo might linger until voting day. In parallel, the world — Hong Kong, Iraq, Ukraine, Chile, Lebanon, China’s Uyghurs, Zimbabwe, Australia’s blazing eastern states, even the WTO’s fraying, to name only a few — made no imprint. In these times, Britain’s amnesia is reflexive, its bubble impermeable.

Much needs to change to let memory, light and the world flood back in, and so to move forward. Everyone will have their own ideas about what that change should be. In my long-held view, a clear government, leadership and direction is the sine qua non. Juliet Samuel is so right: “[A] democracy can only learn by doing, not by trying to wind back the past… Blame is a risk inherent in any action. If there is no one to blame, there is no democracy.”

But what do the people want, and what does their decision make possible? Soon, Britain will find out. •

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The critics were wrong, and wrong in a major way. As industry insiders, they all paid the price for their poor predictions. Their products would all exit the industry, replaced by the new Apple, of course, but also by Samsung and Huawei. What turns out to be a successful innovation might not seem that way at first. There is a reason for that: innovation is new to the world. If it was obvious, someone would have done it.

Technology forecasts can also be wrong in the other direction. In 2001, after years of stealth development, inventor Dean Kamen unveiled the Segway. This was a personal transporter with two wheels on either side of a platform with a stick and handlebar jutting from its centre. At a time when computer-controlled gyroscopes were rare, it seemed like magic. Implausibly, the Segway would balance itself and its occupant upright. The rider simply leaned forward to accelerate and backward to stop. It seemed like something from the future. It seemed like something that you wanted to try.

Many others heralded the Segway as a revolution. Steve Jobs said it was “as big a deal as the PC.” John Doerr, the famous venture capitalist behind Netscape and Amazon, believed it would be bigger than the internet. It was hard to find many early detractors. Alas, a decade and a half later, you might see a Segway used by a traffic cop or group of tourists being led around a city. Otherwise, it is a discarded technological concept. Why didn’t the Segway work out? There were some safety issues, but that hasn’t prevented the police from adopting them. One theory is that people stuck out too much on them, drawing attention in an unwelcome way.

The point is that our forecasts — optimistic or pessimistic — for individual technologies can often be way off base. Marc Andreessen, Netscape founder and venture capitalist, compares his performance with that of Warren Buffett, the world-famous proponent of “value investing”: “Basically, he’s betting against change. We’re betting for change. When he makes a mistake, it’s because something changes that he didn’t expect. When we make a mistake, it’s because something doesn’t change that we thought would.”

We started this discussion of technological prospects with the iPhone and Segway precisely because of this question of far-reaching impact. The iPhone established a dominant design for smartphones. Thanks to people having the internet in their pocket, we got Uber, Airbnb and Spotify. We got Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter to inform, engage and infuriate us. Developing economies skipped over bank accounts to mobile banking, such as Kenya’s ubiquitous M-Pesa service. If the doubters had been right, we would have had none of these things. With the Segway, we didn’t end up changing urban transportation. Billions might have switched to a travel technology that eased congestion and cut emissions, but we didn’t.

Are there still big breakthroughs to be made? On this, economists disagree. There are technological optimists who believe that big breakthrough innovations lie in our future, and pessimists who believe they won’t surpass the past. How can we evaluate their arguments?

The tech optimists

In early 2014, owners of Tesla’s Model S electric vehicles received a recall notice from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration related to a problem that could cause a fire. What car owners usually have to do in these cases is return the car to a dealer to be fixed. This is costly for everyone involved. This time it was different. The problem could be fixed by updating the software in the car, and the update could be pushed to almost 30,000 vehicles overnight because Teslas are connected by default to the internet. No muss, no fuss.

The fact that this could now be done for so many products with embedded software caused Andreessen to proclaim that “software is eating the world.” Put simply, real things were no longer fixed in their capabilities. Because of software, they could be enhanced without having to physically rebuild them.

The tech optimists are not optimistic simply because they know that the universe has more to reveal. They are optimistic because they believe that we are still living in a time of accelerating technological change. Andreessen argues that the benefits of computing technologies and the digitisation revolution are ongoing because they are based on software — something that scales easily. More than half the world’s population came online in just the past decade, and the world is not yet fully connected. Moreover, the value of that network increases disproportionately to the number of people on it — an effect known as Metcalfe’s law.

From the perspective of an innovator in software, that means the customer base is still growing rapidly. What is more, with greater numbers of users, distributed infrastructure — known commonly as “the cloud” — becomes cheaper to use, even aside from the reductions in the cost of hardware in data centres. In 2000, it may have cost a start-up $150,000 per month to host an internet application in the cloud. Today it is less than $150. Those gains translate into increased profitability and lower risk for every single software entrepreneur.

Tech optimists point to multiple trends. Since the 1960s, Moore’s law saw processing power double roughly every eighteen to twenty-four months. As a consequence, microprocessors in 2018 had eight million times as many transistors as the best microprocessor in 1971. Worldwide data storage is now around a zettabyte, or ten bytes to the power of twenty-one. Each minute, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. The next mobile telephony standard, 5G, will operate at many times the speed of the previous generation of wireless technology.

Technologies are sometimes used in unexpected ways. Graphics processing units (developed for hardcore gamers) were used to train neural networks designed to emulate the learning functions of the brain. These new developments in what is called machine learning have led to a renaissance in artificial intelligence research.

Around five years ago, using deep learning methods pioneered by several Canadian university professors, computers’ ability to understand speech and recognise images took a leap forward. These new methods mimicked the brain function, and allowed multiple levels of sorting and classification. The result effectively allowed computers to pick up nuance and associations that even humans would miss. In October 2016, Microsoft engineers announced that their speech recognition software had attained the same level of accuracy as human transcribers when it came to recognising speech in the “Switchboard Corpus,” a set of conversations used to benchmark transcribers. In a controlled environment, machine voice recognition is now more likely to comprehend what we’re saying than the average human. Meanwhile, facial recognition algorithms used by Baidu, Tencent-BestImage, Google and DeepID3 have an accuracy level above 99.5 per cent, compared with humans’ rate of 97.6 percent.

The best way to explain what has happened is to focus on what the new artificial intelligence techniques do best: prediction. Machines can now take a large amount of data (numbers, images, sound files, or videos) and review it for relationships that allow them to forecast with a high degree of accuracy. Image recognition, for example, is basically a prediction activity: “Here is a picture. What is your best guess at what someone would call this?”

Although these technologies still make mistakes, they have the ability to outperform humans in real-world contexts. In 2011, IBM’s Watson computer played the quiz show Jeopardy! against two champions of the game: Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson won. IBM’s next major human-versus-machine contest came in 2018, when the company showed off its IBM Debater. The computer was able to engage at a reasonably coherent level with a human counterpart on the topic of whether government should subsidise space exploration.

Learning machines don’t just have to rely on their own experience. Indian online retailer Myntra recently deployed an algorithm that designed new clothing images by modifying and combining popular patterns. One of those computer-designed t-shirts, featuring blocks of olive, blue and yellow, is now a bestseller. Artificial intelligence is arguably the next general-purpose technology: a technology so foundational that myriad other innovations grow on its base. We have seen this happen with the steam engine, electric power, plastics, computers, and the internet. The optimists believe that artificial intelligence could have the same potential.

To see how technology might drive science, remember that Galileo’s research — which showed convincingly that Earth revolved around the sun — was based on a technological advance in the form of a telescope that could magnify distant objects thirty times. A few decades later, the creation of a microscope that could magnify tiny things 300 times enabled Robert Hooke to document the existence of cells. These massive breakthroughs in astronomy and biology would have been impossible without advances in glass production and precision manufacturing.

Today, it’s easy to point to similar advances. The use of gene editing could revolutionise medical science. Strong and light materials such as graphene could change manufacturing. These are radical technologies that could bring about decades of further innovation.

The tech pessimists

Others take an altogether dimmer view of our prospects. They worry that we have already picked the low-hanging fruit over the past two centuries, and that the outlook for the next century is bleaker. Their argument is not based on some oracle-like insight into the future but instead on the inescapable economic law of diminishing returns.

In economics, the figure that looms largest on this side of the argument is Robert Gordon. His concern revolves around just how great the relatively recent past has been. Prior to 1870, economic growth occurred at a trickle. But after 1870, the major innovations at the heart of the Industrial Revolution began to work their way fully through society. It wasn’t just that steam power made factories more efficient; our knowledge of science also brought us to a point where new technologies were shaping the environment around us.

In the century following 1870, most people in the United States and Western Europe (and a handful of other places) went from carrying water to having it delivered to their houses at the turn of a tap, instantly and in a form safe enough to drink. Washing machines saved time and made our clothes last longer. Indoor toilets took sewage far away from houses at the push of a lever or yank of a chain. Energy could be easily delivered to people’s houses. Information was brought in by the radio, telephone and television. Cars provided freedom and reshaped the urban form. A reasonable person might suppose that society will never again see such radical changes. The interesting thing is that we can see this in the data on economic growth that measures how innovations have translated into productivity improvements.

Growth has its ups and downs. Smooth out the temporary recessions and upswings, though, and the century until 1973 was an era of steady progress that suddenly petered out. Initially, many economists saw the slowdown as an aberration. Nobel laureate Robert Solow, who pioneered the field of economic growth, said in 1987 that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Maybe it was a mismeasurement because computers were assisting services whose productivity was notoriously hard to measure? The economic historian Paul David reminded us that when electricity was introduced, it took decades for it to show up in measures of productivity. Maybe once firms worked out how to use computers effectively, the productivity gains would become apparent?

Many advanced nations did experience a surge in productivity growth in the late 1990s. Yet its rate then slowed in the twenty-first century. For workers, things are even worse because of a decoupling of wages from productivity. Even where firms are getting more output for a given level of inputs, they are not sharing most of those gains with employees.

Consequently, a generation of adults has not experienced the fruits of productivity improvements. They are as well educated as their immediate forebears, they are more lightly taxed, and the businesses that employ them have the benefits of more integrated global financial markets.

The problem comes down to something economists call “diminishing returns.” When England continued to put more land under farming during the nineteenth century, as David Ricardo noted, the productivity of additional acres fell. Take any fixed resource and there is only so much you can extract from it. In the twentieth century, Solow observed that this held for other types of capital such as machines. It also applied to workers. The only way out was technological progress, which allowed society to get more out of the same inputs.

So long as the growth in knowledge we had achieved in the past continued into the future, there was nothing to worry about. Yet here is where the tech optimists and tech pessimists part company. The optimists, as we have noted, anticipate rapid technological progress. The pessimists are not so sure. If that is the case, they say, then why have this generation’s inventions not transformed our lives in the way of the great twentieth-century innovations? Do the twenty-first century’s inventions really compare with air conditioning, airplanes and automobiles (to take just one letter of the alphabet)?

To tech pessimists such as Gordon and Tyler Cowen, the answer comes from merely looking at how technological changes from the 1870s to the 1970s transformed the way we live. Electricity transformed work, shifting people from agriculture to the cities. In the cities that shift combined with running water, sewerage systems, and efficient heating and cooling techniques to allow for a comfortable and productive urban life. Electrical appliances reshaped household economics, freeing women to join the paid labour force. Transport on the roads and air was transformed, facilitating unprecedented interregional trade and travel. All this added up to dramatic improvements in productivity. Since 1973 there have been useful inventions to be sure. But they are yet to deliver an equivalent surge in productivity.

What has the pessimists worried is that researchers and scientists are finding it harder to unearth new ideas. Research by Northwestern University’s Ben Jones shows that Nobel laureates are getting older. To be more precise, over the past century the age at which someone does research that will win them a Nobel prize has been rising. The same is true of work that leads to a patent. In addition, more knowledge breakthroughs are being made by teams rather than individuals. This points to more specialisation in knowledge production, with fewer instances in which an individual comprehends developments at the frontier of multiple disciplines. Because this raises the cost of innovating, Jones calls it the increasing “burden of knowledge.”

As technology advances, it becomes tougher to find the next new thing. Take semiconductors. As we have noted, Moore’s law has seen a steady doubling of the density of computer chips every eighteen to twenty-four months. Moore’s law continued up until the mid 2000s, but significantly, the cost of recent increases is eighteen times larger than it was for similar proportionate increases in the 1970s. The same pattern exists in agriculture and medical research. What was once easy has become hard. It suggests that just to keep the slower growth in productivity that we have, innovators must run faster and faster.

Uncertain prospects

The tech optimists and the tech pessimists both have a point. The optimists note that there is still potential for new knowledge, and can point to exciting possibilities that are attracting significant scientific and engineering resources. The pessimists’ colder calculations remind us how exceptional past growth was and point to the logical implication that those ideas that gave the biggest boosts to productivity were likely ones we have already exploited. Historians such as Joel Mokyr have looked at all this discussion and remind us that we have been here before. In every decade, one can find optimists and pessimists. And, at least as far as continuing technological change is concerned, the optimists have usually been on the right side of history.

What does this all mean, however, for the creation price — that is, the price that must be paid to reward innovators and entrepreneurs for their efforts? The answer lies in the cost of innovation. Where the tech optimists and tech pessimists fundamentally differ is in how costly it will be to innovate in the future. If there are technological opportunities just waiting to be exploited, as the optimists claim, then the creation price can be set relatively low. On the other hand, if the cost of innovation is rising, as the pessimists claim, then the creation price will be higher, and growing over time. More resources will have to be dedicated to innovative activities to maintain historical growth rates. In that situation, we will have to ask if it is a price worth paying.

Forecasting the future is like driving through fog. We need to accept that the creation price is uncertain. It could be high, low or somewhere in between. It will likely be different for different technological opportunities and directions. But at the same time, everyone faces this uncertainty. No one has a special insight into the future. That includes entrepreneurs. And given that uncertainty, the best way to get more equality and more innovation is to reduce the costs those entrepreneurs face today.

Planning for flexibility

Which brings us to equity. Here, the goal ought to be a set of institutions that provide a safety net, both for entrepreneurs who fall short of the stars and for those left behind when the rocket takes off. It pays to think about such institutions as a form of insurance, providing greater resilience in the face of a changing world. If you’re giving advice to a teenager, now is the time to tell him or her about the value of being flexible. Education isn’t just an investment; it’s about providing more life options.

To achieve this in the education system, we propose making teacher effectiveness the core focus of schooling, improving the quality of vocational training, and encouraging MOOCs (massive online open courses). And it makes enormous sense to use the talents of the 51 per cent of the population who are women by encouraging technologies that make jobs more family-friendly, and reforming laws that end up biasing the labour market against women. Gender equity isn’t worthwhile just because it will boost productivity but also because — as Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau might say — it’s 2019.

As economist Sendhil Mullainathan puts it, “The safest prediction is that reality will outstrip our expectations. So, let us craft our policies not just for what we expect but for what will surely surprise us.” The task is to shape a future that looks more like Star Trek than Terminator.

Uncertainty need not be scary. The story of human history — particularly in recent centuries — is of how we have employed our shared ingenuity to improve lives. Longevity has risen. Whole diseases have been eliminated. The typical job is more fulfilling and less painful. Entertainment is more abundant, and much of it is of higher quality (try spending a week watching television from a generation ago). Food standards have risen, and cars are safer than ever. Life is far from perfect, but there is a good deal to celebrate. •

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Sked, originally named Schedugram, offered a solution. The company would manage your social media output, both content and timing, in return for payment. It relied on the fact that a platform controlled by a global technology company — in this case, Facebook’s Instagram — was available to be used as a vehicle. Think of platforms like Instagram as pipelines accessible to competing gas companies, or railway lines on which rival train companies can fight it out on pricing and try to poach each other’s customers. In short: healthy, robust competition on an impartial, accessible platform.

Sked’s relationship to Facebook was similar to that of developers building an app that uses advertising gathered and onsold by Google, or retailers using Amazon not to buy stuff but to sell their own wares in a much larger marketplace. In short, Sked was approaching Facebook not from the front end, where consumers post family photos, but from the back end, where businesses use the platforms to make money. In competition terms, Sked is a third-party user.

Almost by definition, third-party businesses rely on fair and equal access to their chosen platform. But what happens when the platforms — whether they’re online portals, railway hubs or gas pipelines — are controlled by a vertically integrated company competing for space and customers on the same platforms? What guarantee can, say, Sked have that it has been treated fairly when Facebook is developing rival content-publishing software to offer similar services to Instagram users?

This question lies at the heart of a lawsuit currently before the Federal Court of Australia. Sked’s owner, Dialogue Consulting, is claiming that Facebook’s decision to block it from Instagram was a business decision to squeeze out a competitor — something that fails the “substantial lessening of competition” test contained in Australian competition law.

Facebook’s decision to block Sked’s access has been hit by a court injunction — meaning that the Australian start-up can continue to operate at least until next year, when the hearings get under way in Melbourne. But court documents have revealed that Facebook is set to frame this as a privacy issue with no bearing on the right of third parties to compete. The problem, the company will argue, is merely that Sked can only offer its services if its clients hand over their Facebook login details — something the tech giant says is a clear violation of its terms of use.

In what may be an odd turn of events, both sets of lawyers could be right. Sked may have been violating Instagram and Facebook’s terms of use — but who wrote those terms in the first place? And what’s to prevent the platforms from using terms of use as a catch-all excuse for harming a potential rival and violating competition law in the process? What regulation is in place to monitor how terms of use are formulated and implemented?

Of course, there’s nothing uniquely Australian about this argument. The fear that platforms may be using their market power to “self-preference” their own businesses has been examined by regulators around the globe, with South Korea and the United States just two of the jurisdictions where competition watchdogs are now on the warpath. And earlier this year the European Commission, the EU’s regulator, imposed a fine of €1.49 billion on Google for abusing its market dominance by imposing restrictive clauses in contracts with third-party websites, preventing the platform’s rivals from placing advertisements on those websites.

What’s unusual in the Australian context is that the Sked lawsuit, along with a parallel investigation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission into Google’s treatment of a start-up called Unlockd, is occurring at a time of unprecedented regulatory upheaval. The ACCC’s groundbreaking report on Facebook and Google — the first broad overview of its kind in the world — is now with the government and new policy directions are expected to be announced before the end of this year.

That response is likely to be dominated by the headline issues of the ACCC’s digital platforms inquiry: Facebook and Google’s use (or misuse) of data and its implications for users’ privacy, the platforms’ impact on media and journalism, and related regulatory inconsistencies. Yet buried deep in the final report, published in July, is a reference to the predicament of both Unlockd, which is now in receivership, and Sked, underpinned by the regulator’s belief that third-party users are sitting ducks, liable to being shut down at the flick of a switch if the platforms decide to misuse their market power.

In fact, fears that tech giants are already inflicting damage on third-party users by skewing their access to platforms — and using privacy concerns or terms of use as a justification — may well be the biggest challenge facing regulators across the globe. And all indications are that both Facebook and Google are going to fight what they perceive as moves to regulate and oversee their relationship with third-party companies.

There was a time when Australian start-up Unlockd had the world at its feet. Founded in 2014, the Melbourne-based company had prepared an initial public offering for 2018 with an anticipated valuation of over US$180 million and an array of powerful backers. Its only vulnerability was a business model based entirely on third-party access to Google’s advertising services. Without that, Unlockd couldn’t survive — something that became apparent when the search giant pulled the plug.

While it lasted, Unlockd was a platform that allowed owners of smartphones using Google’s Android operating system to receive targeted advertisements when unlocking their devices, in return for in-kind payments — for example, shopping vouchers. It had major business partners in different jurisdictions, but it also relied on advertising being collated and provided by Google’s advertising service, AdMob.

When Google decided to cut the Australian start-up from its firmament — which meant no AdMob and no access to Google Play, the app retail outlet — Unlockd went belly up. Attempts to take legal action against Google in Australia and Britain floundered amid funding concerns; legal action in the United States, however, appears possible. The ACCC’s investigation of what happened has reportedly been under way for months and may yet spark court action of its own.

For its part, Google has said the decision to cut Unlockd’s access had nothing to do with competition but was purely the result of the Australian start-up falling foul of, yes, its terms of use. The search giant said it had given Unlockd time to fix problems it identified and find alternatives, but Unlockd had failed to act. But, just like in Sked’s relationship with Facebook, the question is not so much whether Unlockd violated Google’s terms of use but whether those terms were themselves implemented in a way that violated Australia’s competition law.

The ACCC’s July report was scathing in its assessment of the platforms’ ability to harm third-party users. Facebook and Google had both the “ability and incentive to engage in leveraging behaviour which may affect competition” in online markets, it said. Both advertisers and third-party service providers were particularly vulnerable, the ACCC found, because they had to contend with Facebook and Google’s vertical integration — something that was problematic under competition law.

Under the subheading “Increasing Risk,” the ACCC concluded that the “broad range of markets that each of Google and Facebook operates in provides many opportunities for self-preferencing to occur.” As for whether the platforms actually enjoyed substantial market power, ACCC chairman Rod Sims said it was an open-and-shut case. “I think the argument over whether they have market power is really a strange one,” he said when launching the final report. “I think we’ve got to move on from that argument, because it’s patently obvious that they have market power.”

The ACCC’s draft and final reports were manna from heaven as the lawyers representing Sked in the Federal Court looked for ways to bolster their claim against the social media colossus. The company’s court filings embraced the notion that Facebook had violated Australian competition law, with its amended statement of claim this month arguing that Facebook’s approach to Sked had clearly led to a substantial lessening of competition — again, the trigger words under Australia’s 2010 Competition and Consumer Act. The documents suggest that Facebook’s actions were designed to entrench the platform’s substantial market power and protect its online display advertising revenues by “aggressively deterring [Sked] and other participants from seeking to develop innovative products focused on the planning and publishing of organic content” while also shielding Instagram’s rival content-publishing software from competition.

All this suggests that the capacity of the third parties to take on the tech giants — and the willingness of both the courts and lawmakers to support them — is becoming a significant battlefield in a global war between platforms and the agencies charged with regulating them. The eyes of the world will again be on Australia. •

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One of Fletcher’s predecessors in the portfolio, Malcolm Turnbull, announced the review of Australia’s spectrum policy and management framework way back in May 2014. In 2015, a departmental report found there were “substantial deficiencies” with Australia’s twenty-year-old regime, which was described as “slow, rigid and administratively cumbersome.” Two years later, an exposure draft of a new Radiocommunications Bill was released.

Then things more or less ground to a halt. A major reform process, in an area of government policy usually notable for a high level of political bipartisanship, was apparently stuck in limbo. Does that matter? And what is wrong with the current laws anyway?

Radiofrequency spectrum is sometimes called a “key enabler” of the digital economy — the medium that enables everything to connect with everything else. And the emergence of machine-to-machine connectivity and the Internet of Things, or IoT, means that it is only going to get more important. These developments are often conflated with 5G wireless broadband — a PR coup for the traditional telecommunications industry given that the IoT is already evolving apace using other (terrestrial and satellite) technologies. That’s not to deny the importance of 5G: mobile carriers and governments worldwide are getting behind 5G in a spirit of “if you build it, they will come,” promising eye-watering bandwidth, low latency and the ability to focus “beams” of broadband connectivity at moving as well as fixed objects, even if applications that will fully exploit its unique features are still scarce.

Australia needs an effective and trusted “town planning” regime for our radiofrequency spectrum if we are to maximise its overall public benefit. How spectrum is planned and licensed will determine how soon and how cheaply we can enjoy the benefits of new technologies like 5G. A well-run regime should be as open as possible to opportunities in key overseas markets, and give spectrum users the confidence and incentive to invest in those technologies locally. At the same time, it needs to respect the huge diversity of legacy spectrum uses. Some of these, such as scientific research and public safety, can’t be reduced to a dollar value or expected to compete for spectrum in an open market.

On these criteria, Australia’s current regime is not generally considered to be broken. To quote Minister Fletcher again, “I think it’s important to start from a premise that in the broad, we’ve got a system that has served us reasonably well.”

Far-sighted reforms in the 1990s ensured we benefited early, and continue to benefit, from two emerging licensing models that have since become standard worldwide. The most durable and flexible was “class licensing,” which allows whole classes of transmitters or receivers to be authorised at a single stroke. Chances are you are surrounded by class-licensed devices right now — whether it’s the wi-fi in the device you are reading this on, the set-top box on your television or the car keys in your pocket. And it’s not just for little things. In a world of ever-smarter technologies, class licensing is emerging as a way to authorise any device that doesn’t need the interference protection conferred by costly individual licences.

The second 1990s reform was “spectrum licensing.” These licences grant secure, long-term, fully tradeable property rights over large blocks of spectrum, with highly flexible conditions of use. In January, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, or ACMA, completed an auction of spectrum licences at 3.6 GHz that raised over $834 million, almost all of it from mobile carriers wanting spectrum for 5G services. While this licence type has not become as ubiquitous as reformers originally hoped, the widespread and timely clearance and licensing of key bands has made a large but hidden contribution to Australia’s highly competitive mobile broadband market.

Meanwhile, the more traditional “apparatus licences,” still in use for many spectrum applications, remain very useful for accommodating innovation. They are easier to create, allocate and vary than spectrum licences and can take many more forms. Typically more customised and affordable than spectrum licences, they often authorise a particular service and no more, allowing different uses to share a single band. Apparatus licences support weather radars, satellite earth stations, broadcasting transmitters, police radios and much else besides.

Yet there was and is an excellent case for reviewing spectrum management in Australia, and it can be boiled down to this: spectrum legislation was substantially written in the 1990s, and while it has served us well, good spectrum management is only going to grow more important and challenging. It makes economic sense to review the law and make sure it is optimised for the next twenty years.

If that’s the case for review, then it’s worth trying to identify exactly what is wrong with the elderly Radiocommunications Act 1992. Is this a reno or a knock-down job?

Persistent criticisms of Australia’s spectrum management regime include: too little certainty for existing licensees; slow, clunky and inflexible processes; unwarranted special treatment for broadcasters; and alleged bias towards maximising revenues from auctioning spectrum licences. To this, the regulator would probably add that some of its own regulatory powers and functions no longer reflect changing supply chains and ways of doing business.

The most persistent complaint from industry is uncertainty. High-value spectrum licences confer strong property rights, but the law provides no assurance about what becomes of the spectrum after the licence term expires.

The architects of the 1990s legislation expected that licences would be re-auctioned unless there were compelling grounds to the contrary. The major mobile carriers — pointing to their huge subscriber bases that depend on ongoing services — would prefer to keep the spectrum in perpetuity. With the 700 MHz spectrum licences alone selling for $3.5 billion, the stakes are high. The last Labor government tackled this through a drawn-out “public interest” process that extracted top dollar from the mobile carriers to roll over a number of their existing licences without the uncertainty of going to auction. The present government is not bound to follow this path and the whole issue can be expected to flare up again quite soon, as a new set of licences approach their expiry dates.

For holders of cheaper, customised apparatus licences, the fear is that spectrum licence-conversion processes will commence at short notice and price them out of their current bands, without fair compensation, as mobile broadband services colonise more and more spectrum bands internationally. This is an issue that tends to unite non-telecommunications spectrum users, as current law confers fewer rights and shorter terms on apparatus licences than on spectrum licences.

While it is questionable how much this uncertainty has actually reduced investment in radiocommunications, redesigned laws could, for example, allow for clarification of end-of-term arrangements for future spectrum licensees and give licence holders longer guaranteed access to their channels, where appropriate.

To the extent they hold any water, other industry complaints — that the system is biased towards mobile telecommunications and that spectrum is too expensive — don’t require legislative solutions.

From the perspective of a government keen to withdraw the minister into a policy and strategic role and leave day-to-day administration to the regulator, the chief irritant has been the incredibly clunky process for “reallocating” or “converting” blocks of spectrum to fully tradeable spectrum licences. Designed when spectrum licences were new and scary, it requires either a price-based allocation (typically an auction) or the “conversion” of an existing apparatus licence that happens to cover the same part of the spectrum — but only after a lengthy ping-pong game of formal ACMA recommendations and ministerial declarations. Political pressure, particularly from carriers, for more spectrum to feed soaring demand for wireless data has led to an unhealthy focus on how to speed up the bureaucratic ping-pong game, risking the rushed development of technically complex and legally sensitive instruments and the pre-emption of public consultation processes.

Current legal processes could undoubtedly be simplified and the respective roles of the minister and the spectrum and competition regulators better distinguished.

Another criticism of current law is the exceptional treatment of free-to-air broadcasting. Here, the law has evolved separately because of the unique role of broadcasting in a democracy. To safeguard them from political pressure from governments, broadcasters’ licences are in effect perpetual and regulated more at arm’s length from the minister. They are not tradeable the way other licences are, and resuming and reallocating the bands broadcasters use is much more complex and difficult than for other frequencies.

Ending these special arrangements was a key recommendation of the department’s 2015 review paper. It proposed “normalisation” of broadcaster spectrum access arrangements, subject to a guarantee of ongoing access to spectrum. The government has since tackled one major anomaly, by changing the way commercial broadcasters are taxed. They used to pay a special tax on their gross earnings as broadcasters, set to reflect the value that came from limits on the number of licences in any market. Now they pay a smaller annual tax on their apparatus licences, intended to reflect the value of the spectrum.

From the regulator’s perspective, online trading has revolutionised modern equipment supply chains, leaving ACMA’s powers and remedies behind in some areas. Its compliance and enforcement powers are overly reliant on criminal offences and might benefit from more civil remedies and better information-gathering powers.

So — should we renovate what we have, or knock it down and start again? The 2015 departmental report recommended replacing the current legislative framework. The centrepiece of the new Radiocommunications Bill released in May 2017 was a single licensing system to replace spectrum and apparatus licences. Class licences were also to be replaced, but by something similar: in effect, class licences by another name. The exposure draft was also incomplete. Future arrangements for free-to-air broadcasters were still under development, as were vital details about how transition might take place.

Passing a whole new act to replace the existing three licence types with two, more flexible new licence types would be an extremely expensive way to free the government and ACMA to fix some genuine shortcomings with the current regime. Replacing all apparatus and spectrum licences is expected to take five years from passage of the new law. The job would be huge even if no serious reforms were attempted in parallel. Most of the tens of thousands of affected licence holders would receive no clear pay-off, and the qualified support for the new legislation from industry to date — mainly from the mobile carriers — may evaporate altogether if the regulator were forced to redirect significant resources away from its day-to-day work. This includes ACMA’s ambitious agenda of band re-planning to support 5G wireless broadband and other new technologies.

After more than twenty years, Australia’s once-visionary spectrum-regulation arrangements are showing their age. With the increasing importance of wireless communications, updating them should yield long-term benefits. Almost from its outset, however, the spectrum review has focused on just one option: that of knocking everything down and starting again. How much of the policy pay-off from an entirely new licensing system could be achieved, more quickly and cheaply, by modifying rather than abolishing the three existing licence categories? By opening the door to these kinds of questions, this latest pause in the process may not spell the end of valuable reform, but actually make it more likely. •

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To start with, let’s look at Bitcoin. Here, the central idea is that coins are generated (or “mined”) by performing an extraordinarily difficult but entirely pointless calculation that can be verified publicly. This “proof of work” is recorded in a database called a distributed ledger, using a technique referred to as blockchain. Additions to the blockchain are validated through a consensus among all the nodes in the network of users.

This model has a number of perceived advantages and one gigantic disadvantage. The main advantage is that the ledger requires no central authority and is effectively immutable, thereby providing a currency independent of any central bank or issuing authority. The big disadvantage is that the technique wastes vast amounts of energy, roughly equal to the total value of bitcoins created. At its present price and creation rate, Bitcoin is wasting energy equal to the total consumption of a country like New Zealand.

Bitcoin was designed to be used in place of ordinary currencies for purchases of goods and services. This hasn’t happened, at least for ordinary transactions. Merchant adoption has been negligible and is, if anything, declining. For example, Brisbane Airport claimed in January last year that it would be the world’s first Bitcoin airport, but a year and a half later only three stores in its international terminal are accepting the coins, and only a handful of transactions are processed each month.

Bitcoin’s only significant use in transactions is among users who wish to conceal from the authorities the fact that they are making drug deals or evading exchange controls in countries like Venezuela. Even there, success is mixed, with a number of “dark web” drug markets recently closed down.

The majority of Bitcoin activity is purely speculative. It’s true that the supply is finite, which is good for speculators, but that’s to ignore the ultimately more important fact that the coins are not backed by anything. By contrast, ordinary (or “fiat”) currencies have value because issuing governments accept them in payment of taxes and other obligations.

Facebook’s Libra is the direct opposite of Bitcoin in two critical respects. First, unlike the decentralised Bitcoin, Libra is centralised. Coins will be issued only by Facebook and its trusted partners. This means that there is no need to perform the energy-guzzling “mining” process. On the other hand, it is entirely inconsistent with the idea of cryptocurrencies being outside the control of any one organisation.

Second, whereas Bitcoin is backed only by the willingness of cryptocurrency users to buy it, Libra will be a “stablecoin” backed by a basket of currencies, including the US dollar. This raises the obvious question: why not just pay in your own currency — or, if that is problematic, in US dollars?

Facebook’s answer to this question is that Libra will be aimed, at least initially, at users in poor countries who have access to Facebook but not to banks or other financial institutions. Given the proliferation of smartphones in poor countries and the patchy development of financial networks, the potential market is large.

But so, on the other hand, are the obstacles. Libra will be a financial instrument that allows users in poor countries to trade within a basket of rich country currencies. That’s likely to create plenty of regulatory obstacles at both ends. After all, at some stage Libra funds will need to re-enter national economies via a route that is subject to national regulation.

A few years ago, when cryptocurrencies seemed unstoppable and Silicon Valley had far more political support than Wall Street, these obstacles might have been swept aside. Today, however, a new venture combining one of the least-trusted tech companies with the long-hated credit card companies and gig economy ventures like Uber seems designed to generate hostility across the political spectrum.

Coming back to our second question: if financial instruments as different as Bitcoin and Libra can be called cryptocurrencies, does the word have any meaning at all? Bitcoin advocates would answer that stablecoins like Libra aren’t really cryptocurrencies at all. On the other hand, the fact that Bitcoin is barely used as a medium of exchange raises the question of whether it can be called a currency of any kind.

Ultimately, the crucial part of the name is “crypto.” What Bitcoin and Libra have in common is a desire to avoid the constraints of government regulation of financial markets by burying their operations in layers of technological mystery. These aspirations, brought together in the term “fintech,” reflect the market libertarianism that dominated both the technology and finance worlds in the heady days of the 1990s, and persisted even after the global financial crisis of 2008. It remains to be seen whether such aspirations will flourish in the current, much less favourable environment. •

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With the big digital technology corporations being a major target of these worries, a global “techlash” has been gaining momentum. Politicians and regulatory agencies in Germany, France, Britain, Australia, Canada and, most recently, the United States have been calling for greater regulation of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and other companies.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal — the revelation that the data of up to eighty-seven million Facebook users was harvested by political campaigns including Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — was an ostensible trigger for the debate about the misuse of personal data by the digital platform giants. But concerns about the rise of digital monopolies and surveillance capitalism have been brewing for some time. It was no surprise that Democratic Party 2020 presidential nominees, such as Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, have made it a centrepiece of their campaigns.

The End of Trust is the first nonfiction collection from McSweeney’s, an American publisher best known for its literary fiction. Published with the editorial support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it features essays by authors including Cory Doctorow, Ethan Zuckerman, Gabriella Coleman, Douglas Rushkoff and Bruce Schneier, as well as interviews with Edward Snowden, Julia Angwin, Alvaro Bedoya and Virginia Eubanks.

Working across a range of topics, the core theme of the collection is that individual privacy has been eroded by the predatory behaviour of digital technology companies and the ever more elaborate and pervasive surveillance systems used by government agencies involved primarily with law enforcement but reaching into other domains. While the roots of distrust in the United States are multi-causal and predate the internet (and this is very much a book rooted in the US setting), it has been supercharged by digital platforms and ever-more sophisticated systems for monitoring personal activity.

At the heart of the essays is a cooling of enthusiasm for all things digital, particularly from one-time true believers. Sara Wachter-Boettcher captures this in her essay on gendered online harassment and abuse, noting that while she never particularly trusted tech companies, she was an enthusiast for Twitter as a means not only to connect with peers but also to “bring together my personal and my professional sides, teasing out a space for myself that felt smart and authentic.” The loss of trust described here is not so much in the institutions, let alone the culture of the tech industry, but in one’s self, and how that self is projected out via digital platforms.

Like many of the contributors to The End of Trust, Cory Doctorow focuses on privacy. Doctorow presents the struggle against privacy breaches and commercial surveillance as the next activist frontier, akin to struggles to tackle climate change or challenge the tobacco industry. Noting the risks of what he terms “privacy nihilism” — the sense that since we are not going to stop using email or social media or satellite navigation, then there is nothing we can do about harms associated with the loss of privacy — Doctorow presents the struggle as being between those who use digital technologies for surveillance and those who are deploying cryptographic tools that make “evading surveillance more possible than at any time in history.”

The back-and-forth about whether the primary matter of concern is privacy or trust is a feature of this collection. For Bruce Schneier, privacy is an essential component of personal liberty, of the capacity to flourish as a person and, as a consequence, of social progress. Societies seen as having low levels of privacy, and correspondingly high levels of censorship and surveillance, become stagnant because “we simply aren’t as willing to be our individual selves when others are watching.” Privacy also protects minorities and those who deviate from the social norms of the time from “the tyranny of the majority,” and since acts of subversion of such norms are essential for progress, there is a social cost to forms of government and corporate surveillance that restrict the freedom to experiment.

The focus on decentralised systems as the ultimate foundation of trust leads, perhaps not surprisingly, to blockchain. One of the more intriguing contributions comes from the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden in a spirited interview with his lawyer, Ben Wizner. For Snowden, the beauty of blockchain is that it tackles a core problem with trust, which is that you simply cannot ultimately trust people or institutions to do the right thing and respect your privacy, particularly not large ones such as governments, banks and companies (like Amazon, Google and Facebook) that trade in personal information. The problem with the internet economy thus far is that “a platform can be decentralised while the money and power remain very centralised.” For Snowden, who acknowledges that the benefits of blockchain will be unevenly distributed, we can accept that we live in a world where “everyone is lying about everything” and nonetheless “create systems you don’t have to trust,” by virtue of the verifiable and immutable nature of the “blocks” stored on the distributed database.

Other contributors are less sure that the answer lies in blockchain technology. Malkia Cyril writes that tech companies have a long history of complicity with police in the surveillance of black and minority communities, going back to assisting the FBI with phone tapping. Alvaro Bedoya asks whether privacy is best understood as a “communal right” rather than something owned by individuals. Given that surveillance technologies employed against a minority group may later be turned back on those who were at the time indifferent to that minority, there is a case for thinking of privacy as “more of a team thing.” Interviewing Bedoya, Cindy Cohn makes the point that “one of the fundamental things that I struggle with is how to talk about something that is really about the collective in a society where all of the marketing and hoopla is about me, me, me.”

Other contributions identify how the problems of trust run more deeply than the protection of individual privacy, or the deployment of encrypted technologies (such as Signal, which is plugged a lot in the book) or decentralised platforms like blockchains.

Douglas Rushkoff points to the limitations of tackling propaganda with counter-propaganda (or “attacking bad memes with good ones”), or relying on new filters, algorithms or digital counter-measures. He notes that such tit-for-tat strategies mean that “the battle for our hearts and minds ends up occurring on a level far removed from that of civic discourse.” Moreover, it is a game that only those most engaged with the digital technologies are likely to play, and they are highly unlikely to be the most marginalised, disaffected or vulnerable. Rushkoff instead proposes scaling down our interactions and prioritising human scale, in order to rebuild relations of trust, while at the same time seeking to embed “pro-social attitudes and behaviours… in our platforms and the standards we establish for ourselves when using them.”

Ethan Zuckerman also stresses that responses to what he terms “the economics of mistrust” should not start from the Hobbesian proposition that humans and the institutions they create are inherently untrustworthy, and that we need a technological fix that transcends human scale. The problem with the distrust of everything, and the desire for a perfect privacy solution that absolutely protects individual sovereignty is that trust on a society-wide scale requires us to be prepared to trust institutions — to make what Rachel Botsman terms a “leap into the unknown” — in order to benefit from what institutions and organisations have to offer.

To an unprecedented degree, we are increasingly doing this. While distrust of news media, banks, political parties and organised religion may be on the rise, we trust new digital platforms in ever-deeper realms of our personal life, including ride-hailing, accommodation, online shopping and dating. The challenge, then, is not so much to distrust everything and give up on privacy but to think about, and work towards, more trustworthy institutions. Zuckerman argues that we need to “design new systems that let us cooperate and trust each other” and to forsake the “expensive fantasy of a trustless world” and do the “hard work of building new systems that deserve our trust.”

While the privacy agenda runs the risk of leading to individual retreat, a trust agenda should be about using digital technologies to rebuild social bonds while also developing new means to hold the giant digital platforms to public account. •

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High enthusiasm followed by disillusionment with technological innovation is a familiar story, and is the starting point of Peter Lewis’s Webtopia. Lewis, a former journalist and Labor political adviser, is the director of “progressive research and communications company” Essential Media and a columnist with Guardian Australia.

This biographical outline wouldn’t be necessary if it weren’t for the fact that Lewis has made his own experiences, and those of his fellow generation Xers, central to the story he tells. Alas, this book is yet another example of memoir-as-journalism, neatly described by journalist Elle Hardy as “an explorative essay shaped by the author’s views and experiences rather than comprehensive investigation of concepts.” In Australia and beyond it has become the dominant mode of contemporary nonfiction writing.

Using the personal and professional stories of friends, colleagues and acquaintances (many of whom, like the author, are members of the progressive political and media class), Lewis structures his narrative around the contention that his generation have lived their lives in four acts: “the way we were before the web, the way we thought the world would be when the web came along and blew our minds; the way the world is now (which is not quite the utopia we expected) and what the world could become if only we could get our act together.”

There is some logic in this structure, but at times it feels forced, and it yields some of the book’s most banal moments. It is particularly problematic during Lewis’s regular lapses into gen X nostalgia — recalling the “magical” sound of a landline telephone, say, or buying a Smiths LP from a record store. (Has he not heard about the worldwide vinyl revival?) Things really go off track when Lewis explains the internet as if it’s still 1995 and his readers have never been online: “The genius of the web is that you don’t need to house all the information on your own computer in order to see it.”

Meanwhile, he finds the kids of today to be inevitably diminished by their addiction to smartphones. Eavesdropping on a group of teenagers laughing and posing for photos on a night out, he suggests that technology has transformed them into “fundamentally different creatures” from his own generation. “We both chased the normal things that teenagers do: acceptance, finding a place, identity,” he writes. “But where my generation sought it in joining a group, it seems to me these kids are seeking something different, an identity defined by how they stand out from the crowd rather than how they fit in.” One could more persuasively conclude the group remains just as important to these young people, despite their ubiquitous phones.

Perhaps Lewis is overcorrecting here. After all, he confesses to having been exceptionally naive upon the arrival of the internet, up to and beyond the point of parody: “From the moment of its conception the web was an object of beauty, built on a set of simple choices that would transform the world.” Later, contemplating what the web might have achieved in economics and international relations, he gets more specific:

As national economies collapsed into regional and global free trade blocs, countries would better share scarce resources across national boundaries, especially things like ideas and IP that could be expressed as bits not atoms. A rejuvenated United Nations would lead collective responses to global challenges like climate change, population growth and human rights. The rising middle classes of Asia and India would embrace these global values and adapt them to their own specific cultures. Africa and the Middle East would follow suit, tapping technology to bypass the need for an industrial economy, transforming directly into vibrant, information-based societies. As the alliances of a unified Europe inspired other blocs of cooperation, the very idea of a nation-state would become outmoded. Humanity would connect as one, wrapped in its warm and loving web of togetherness.

Putting to one side the Western cultural supremacism inherent in his thought, did Lewis really believe in such nonsense? Webtopia indeed.

This naivety is also evident in the book’s case studies, in which Lewis too often accepts at face value the self-congratulatory puff of the people he should be challenging. Nowhere is this more apparent than his discussion with Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor about that outlet’s entry into the Australian media market. “Inside the Sydney office, a converted inner-city warehouse floor,” Lewis enthuses, “it feels like the sort of buzzy mothership that existed before the internet threw down its existential challenge to the media.”

“The model is the opposite to clickbait,” says Taylor, a debatable contention that Lewis fails to interrogate. Headlines like “I Was Filled with Self-Loathing after Losing My Novel on My Laptop — Russell Crowe Came to My Rescue” and “‘You Stole My Cheese!’: The Seven Best Post-it Note Wars” may be aimed at a younger, more progressive audience, but they’re still clickbait. Lewis doesn’t probe whether the Guardian Australia behaves any better or any worse than its peers in an industry that underpays staff reporters and often pays external contributors barely anything at all.

We shouldn’t run down the Guardian, which has produced countless instances of fine journalism in its six years in Australia. But if all Lewis is prepared to do is reinforce its boilerplate PR spiel about being a different type of news organisation, he runs the risk of repeating the same errors that made him a wide-eyed webtopian.

Quite apart from the conceptual problems, this book is also littered with some truly awful prose. Take: “The challenge is to strip back all that white noise and filter out the morsels that have meaning.” Or: “Politics was big and loud, painted on a broad canvas where the next chapter of human history was up for grabs.” It’s difficult to know where to begin with metaphors so mixed.

Then there are the platitudes, some of which could easily find themselves repeated on chalkboards outside struggling cafes: “While we may be asked to click, we are never asked to really share; to bring a plate or mow the lawns and build something that becomes so real and such an integral part of who we are that it ends up being part of our life story.”

Such attempts at profundity become more and more prevalent as Lewis tries and fails to come up with any meaningful proposals that will “make the net work.” On the one hand he wants governments to step in and regulate the companies that control the internet. On the other he wants individuals to take responsibility for using the web safely and ethically, despite their lack of agency:

If we want the web to be what it could still be — empowering and transformative — we need to work harder at tapping the one truly natural resource that powers it: people. Surely that’s the most valuable element that lies inside the web, not another predictive algorithm but the actual agents of human interaction: us.

Webtopia is a missed opportunity. Laments about the tech god that failed are becoming overly familiar, but this by no means lessens the urgency of the questions being asked. Unfortunately, there are no answers here. As someone who spends too much time online might say, this ain’t it, chief. •

The post The tech god that failed appeared first on Inside Story.

I have never liked drawing attention to the fact that I’m a woman in technology. I don’t want the most prominent fact about me to be my gender rather than my expertise or my experience, or the impact of my work. In male-dominated settings, the last thing I want to feel is that I’m only there because of my gender, or that it’s the first thing people notice about me. I don’t like that being described as a “woman in tech” flattens my identity, makes gender the defining wrapper around my experience, irrespective of race, class, education, family history, political beliefs and all the other hows and whys that make life more complicated. These are some of the intellectual reasons.

A more immediate reason why I haven’t wanted to be known for talking about gender is because I’m still young and I want to have a career in this industry. I like what I do. I work on a range of issues related to data sharing and use. At the moment I lead a technical team designing data standards and software to support consumers sharing data on their own terms with organisations they trust. Data underpins so much of the current interest in AI, so it’s a good time to be working on projects trying to make it useful and learning to understand its limitations.

It’s also true that most of the time my clients, employers, team members, fellow panellists and advocates are male. Most of the time they’re excellent people. I don’t like making them feel uncomfortable. People generally don’t like feeling as if they’re not being fair or that in some structural ways, the world isn’t fair. Avoiding making people uncomfortable — particularly those who decide whether you’ll be invited to speak at a conference, or hired, or promoted, or put forward for a new exciting opportunity — is still a sensible career move.

So I have long assumed that the best way to talk about gender and be a strong advocate for women is from a distance, at the pinnacle of my career, when I’m the one in the position of power. What a strange pact to make with myself: to effect change in the technology industry, to become a female leader, I just need to stay silent on issues affecting women in the industry. In thirty years’ time ask me what it was like and, boy, will I have some stories to tell — and some really good suggestions!

But I don’t think I can wait any longer. My sense of how to navigate the world as a woman and still get ahead was shaken in 2018. In the media, I watched as women who tried to keep their heads down and avoid making a scene still found themselves branded attention-seekers, deviants, villains — even though it was men behaving badly who were on trial. I published a book in a technology field and tried diligently to avoid discussing gender, only to be dismayed by the influence gender had on how it was received, who read it, who saw value in it.

At events, it was almost always women who approached me to say they enjoyed the panel and to ask follow-up questions. The younger the men, the more likely they were to want to argue with and dismiss me. At the book signings that followed, while my queues mainly comprised women, their requests for dedications were almost always to sons and nephews, brothers and husbands. I smiled politely through comments about being on panels specifically to add “a woman’s perspective.” I looked past the male panellists who interrupted me, repeated me, who reached out to touch me while they made their point.

I was also pregnant. By the time you read this I will have given birth to a baby girl. It is hard to describe how much this has recast what I thought was the right and wrong way to make it as a woman. She is the daughter of two intelligent parents who are passionate about technology. She is currently a ferocious and unapologetic wriggler who takes up every inch of available space and demands our attention, oblivious to the outside world. I don’t know her yet but I already admire her for that.

I do not want her to grow to believe that in order to successfully navigate the world she must make herself small, put up with poor treatment, apologise for taking up space that is rightfully hers. I don’t know how I would look her in the eye when she realises that this way of being does not help her.

While it can seem like we’re only now talking about gender issues in the tech sector, the discussion has been going on for decades. What makes it wearying is how many of the problems raised years ago remain the same.

In 1983 — before I was born — female graduate students and research staff from the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratories at MIT published a vivid account of how a hostile environment to women in their labs impeded academic equality. They described bullying, sexual harassment and negative comments explicitly and implicitly based on gender. They described being overlooked for their technical expertise, and ignored and interrupted when they tried to offer that expertise. The authors made five pages of recommendations aimed at addressing conscious and unconscious differences in attitudes towards women in the industry. “Responsibility for change rests with the entire community,” they wrote, “not just the women.”

It’s clear that for there to be serious improvements in the numbers of girls and women in technology, cultural attitudes towards what girls are interested in and capable of will have to change. We have to want them to change. But I’m not sure that we want that as a society. In Australia, declining participation rates among girls studying advanced maths and science subjects in high school continue to be a cause for concern. The reasons for the decline remain broadly the same as they were twenty years ago, when Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher interviewed more than a hundred female and male computer science students at Carnegie Mellon University, home to one of the top computer science departments in the United States, as part of their seminal study of gender barriers facing women entering the profession.

In Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, Margolis and Fisher charted how computing was claimed as male territory and made hostile for girls and young women. Throughout primary and high school, the curriculum, teachers’ expectations and parental attitudes were shaped around pathways that assumed computers were for boys. Even where women did persist with an interest in computers into college, Margolis and Fisher observed that by the time they graduated “most… faced a technical culture whose values don’t match their own, and ha[d] encountered a variety of discouraging experiences with teachers, peers and curriculum.”

Back then, as now, barriers persisted in the workforce. In the mid 2000s, The Athena Factor report on female scientists and technologists working in forty-three global companies in seven countries concluded that while 41 per cent of employees in technical roles in those companies were women, over time 52 per cent of them would quit their jobs. The key reasons for quitting: exclusionary, predatory workplace cultures; isolation, often as the sole woman on a technical team; and stalled career pathways that saw women moved sideways into support or executor roles. “Discrimination,” Meg Urry, astrophysicist and former chair of the Yale physics department, wrote in the Washington Post in 2005, “isn’t a thunderbolt, it isn’t an abrupt slap in the face. It’s the slow drumbeat of being underappreciated, feeling uncomfortable and encountering roadblocks along the path to success.”

These themes emerge in thousands of books, white papers, op-eds and articles: women leave the tech industry because they’re isolated, because they’re ignored, because they’re treated unfairly, underpaid and unable to advance. These problems persist, and every year there are new headlines concerning gender discrimination at every level of the industry. In 2018, female employees working for Google in California filed a class-action lawsuit alleging the multinational tech company systematically paid women less for doing similar work to men, while “segregating” technically qualified women into lower-paying, non-technical career tracks. The same year, 20,000 employees and contractors walked out at offices around the world to protest sexual harassment at the company after news broke that Andy Rubin, the “father of Android,” had been paid US$90 million to leave Google quietly amid credible accusations of sexual harassment.

In every tech organisation I have worked in, these kinds of dynamics remain uncomfortably familiar. There are more women than men in administrative roles, in project coordination, and in front-end development and design roles, although some of these women began in the industry with technical degrees and entry-level technical roles. Gender-related salary gaps persist, even within the same technical roles and leadership positions. HR processes, designed to create a level playing field, still inadvertently reward those who complain the loudest, who demand more money, who tend more often than not to be men. It remains difficult for women to pursue bullying and harassment complaints, particularly against powerful harassers, without career consequences.

Writing about gender in technology, it’s easy to fall into what computer engineer Erica Joy Baker describes as “colourless diversity.” A 2018 study by the Pew Research Center noted that while 74 per cent of women in computer jobs in the United States reported experiencing workplace discrimination, 62 per cent of African-American employees also reported racially motivated discrimination. Women of colour in tech find themselves doubly affected.

I am reflected in the statistics around gender: I am affected by them, perpetuate them, benefit from them. I have never successfully negotiated a meaningful salary increase or bonus. I have watched as male successors in my own former roles are paid more than I was to do the same job. I have managed teams where my male employees earned more than I did. These kinds of things happen both because I don’t speak up and because organisations let it happen.

I know this because as a manager, I let it happen too. I get requests for higher pay and promotions more frequently from men. Even if they’re rude or unreasonable or completely delusional, I take their sense of being undervalued seriously. I want to make them happy. The women I have managed rarely express their outrage or frustration so openly. They’re slower to escalate concerns and less likely to threaten to leave. I also know that as a white woman in tech, despite these experiences, I’m still statistically likely to be paid more and receive more opportunities than any of my non-white colleagues, male or female or non-binary.

Years of focus on bringing more women into technology roles have created a sense of being eagerly sought out and highly valued. But workplace dynamics and cultural attitudes still persist in making women of all ages, ethnicities, sexualities, once they’re in the sector, feel undervalued and ignored. It’s a strange paradox to live within. On the basis of our gender we’re highly visible (more visible if we’re white and heterosexual). As experts, as contributors to those technologies, it can still feel like we’re hidden in plain sight.

In August 2018, WIRED magazine asked: “AI is the future: but where are the women?” Working with start-up Element AI, it estimated that only around 12 per cent of leading machine-learning researchers in AI were women. Concerns about a lack of diversity in computer science have taken on new urgency, partly driven by growing awareness of how human designers influence the systems making decisions about our lives. In its article, WIRED outlined a growing number of programs and scholarships aimed at increasing gender representation in grad schools and industry, at conferences and workshops, while concluding that “few people in AI expect the proportion of women or ethnic minorities to grow swiftly.”

For women, the line between “inside” and “outside” the tech sector — and therefore what contributions are perceived as valuable — keeps moving. While WIRED focused on a narrow set of skills being brought to applied AI — machine-learning researchers — it nonetheless recast these skills as the only contributions worth counting towards AI’s impact. The “people whose work underpins the vision of AI,” the “group charting society’s future” in areas like facial recognition, driverless cars and crime prediction, didn’t include the product owners, user-experience designers, ethnographers, front-end developers, the sociologists and anthropologists, subject-matter experts or the customer-relationship managers who work alongside machine-learning researchers on the same applied projects.

Many of these roles evolved explicitly to create the connection between a system and society, between its intended use and unintended consequences. They are roles that typically encourage critical thinking, empathy, seeking out of diverse perspectives — all skills that leaders in the tech industry have identified as critical to the success of technology projects. The proportions of women in these kinds of roles tends to be higher, both by choice and perhaps, as the female employees at Google alleged in their 2018 lawsuit, by design. Yet, even as we wrestle in public debates with the impact the design of a technical system has on humans and society, our gaze keeps sliding over these people — already in the industry — who are explicitly tasked with addressing these problems, including many women. If in public commentary we don’t see or count their contributions as part of the development of AI, then their contributions don’t get valued as part of teams developing AI.

I want more diverse women to become machine-learning researchers. I also want the contributions women already make in a range of roles to be properly recognised. What matters isn’t so much getting more women into a narrowly defined set of technical roles, the boundaries of which are defined by the existing occupants (who are overwhelmingly male). This is still a miserably myopic approach to contributions that “count” in tech. What matters is that the industry evolves to define itself according to the wide set of perspectives, the rich range of skills and expertise, that go into making technology work for humans.

What I really don’t want to see, as the relationship between technical systems and humans takes on greater status in the industry, is women being pushed out of these important roles. It would be the continuation of a historical pattern in the tech industry. As technology historians including Marie Hicks have shown, despite this persistent sense that women “just don’t like computing,” women were once the largest trained workforce in the computing industry. They calculated ballistics and space-travel trajectories; they programmed the large, expensive electromechanical computers crunching data for government departments and commercial companies while being paid about the same as secretaries and typists. But as the value of computing grew, women were squeezed out, sidelined, overtaken by male colleagues. Once considered a “soft” profession, women’s work, not “technical” as defined by the men who occupied other technical roles, computer programming eventually became highly paid, prized… and male-dominated.

I worry that we’re about to do it again, this time in ethical AI. Ethical AI is in the process of transitioning from being a “soft” topic for people more concerned with humans than computers, and treated by the technology industry primarily as a side project, to being a mainstream focus. Experts in ethical AI are a hot commodity. KPMG recently declared “AI ethicists” one of the most in-demand hires for technology companies of 2019. There’s a reason a book about ethical AI like Made by Humans got picked up by a mainstream publisher.

A significant proportion of critical research fuelling interest in the impacts of AI on humans and society has been driven by women: as computer scientists, mathematicians, journalists, anthropologists, sociologists, lawyers, non-profit leaders and policymakers. MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini’s work on bias in facial recognition systems broke open the public debate about whether facial recognition technology is yet fit for purpose. Julia Angwin’s team at ProPublica investigated bias in computer programs being used as aids in criminal sentencing decisions, and exposed competing, incompatible definitions of algorithmic fairness. Data scientist Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Destruction was one of the first big mainstream books to question whether probabilistic systems were as flawless as they appeared.

There are many prominent women in AI ethics: Kate Crawford and Meredith Whittaker, co-directors of the AI Now Institute in New York and long-term scholars of issues of bias and human practice with data; Margaret Mitchell, a senior machine-learning researcher at Google, well known in the industry for her work in natural-language processing, who has drawn attention to issues of bias in large corpuses of text used to train systems in speech and human interaction; Shira Mitchell, quantifying fairness models in machine learning; danah boyd; Timnit Gebru; Virginia Eubanks; Laura Montoya; Safiya Umoja Noble; Rachel Coldicutt; Emily Bender; Natalie Schluter. In early 2019, when TOPBOTS, the US-based strategy and research firm influential among companies investing in applied AI, summarised its top ten “breakthrough” research papers in AI ethics, more than half of the authors were women.

Which is why it’s been disconcerting to see, as interest in and funding for AI ethics grows, the gender distribution on panels discussing ethics, in organisations set up explicitly to consider ethical AI, start to skew towards male-dominated again. It’s not just that more men are taking an interest in ethical AI; this is a reflection of its importance, which is something to be celebrated. What troubles me is that what “ethical AI” encompasses often seems to end up in these conversations being redefined as a narrow set of technical approaches that can be applied to existing, male-dominated professions.

Even as the women in these professions — and many of the influential women I just cited are computer scientists and machine-learning researchers — are doing pathbreaking work on the limitations (as well as the strengths) of technical methods quantifying bias and articulating notions of “fairness,” these technical interpretations of ethics become the sole lens through which “ethical AI” is commoditised.

Ethical AI is thus recast as a “new,” previously unconsidered technical problem to be solved, and solved by men. I have been consistently unnerved to find myself talking to academics and institutes planning research investments in ethical AI who don’t know who Joy Buolamwini is, or Kate Crawford, or Shira Mitchell. And I worry that user researchers, designers, anthropologists, theorists — many of them women — whose work in the industry has for years involved marrying the choices made by engineers in designing systems with the humans affected by them, will end up being pushed out as contributors towards “ethical AI.” I’m afraid we’ll just keep finding new ways to render women in the industry invisible. I worry that my own contributions will be invisible.

Every woman in technology can tell you a story about invisibility. At a workshop in 2018, I watched a senior, well-respected female colleague, who was supposed to be leading the discussion, get repeatedly interrupted and ignored. She finally broke into the conversation to say, mystified, as though she couldn’t quite trust what was in front of her own eyes and ears, “Didn’t I just say that? Did anyone hear me say that?” What stayed with me was the way she asked the group the question: she wasn’t angry, just… puzzled. As though perhaps the problem wasn’t that people weren’t listening to her, but that there was some issue with the sound in the room itself, or with her. As if perhaps the problem was that she was a ghost who couldn’t be heard.

I’ve listened to men repurpose my proposals as their own — not intentionally or maliciously, just not realising that they had heard me say the same thing seconds earlier. I’ve watched as men on projects I’ve led attribute our success to their own contributions. It is unsettling and strange to be both visible as a woman in tech, and yet invisible as a contributor to tech. For women of colour, invisibility is doubly felt. Even at conferences and on panels dedicated explicitly to the experiences of women in tech, most panellists will be white women in the industry.

Perhaps nobody has captured the stark influence of gender on visibility more vividly than the late US mathematician Ben Barres. In his essay “Does Gender Matter?” Barres recounts his own experiences as a graduate student at MIT, entering the school as a woman before transitioning to a man. At the time, Barres was responding to comments made by male academics, including Harvard president Lawrence Summers and psychologist Steven Pinker, asserting biological differences to explain the low numbers of women in maths and science. In the essay, Barres is careful not to attribute undue significance to his own experiences. But sometimes anecdotes reveal as much as statistics do.

Barres described how, as a woman and as the only person to solve a difficult maths problem in a large class mainly made up of men, she was told by the professor that “my boyfriend must have solved it for me.”After she changed sex, a faculty member was heard to say that “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but then his work is much better than his sister’s.” Confronting innate sex differences head on, Barres described the intensive cognitive testing he underwent before and after transitioning and the differences he observed: increased spatial abilities as a man; the ability to cry more easily as a woman. But by far, he wrote, the main difference he noticed on transitioning to being a man was “that people who don’t know I am transgendered treat me with much more respect. I can even complete a whole sentence without being interrupted by a man.”

This is the first time I’ve written publicly about my own experiences as a woman in technology. Up till now I’ve played by the rules. I have spent years being polite in the face of interruptions, snubs, harassment. I know instinctively how to communicate my opinion in a way that won’t upset anyone and have tended to approach talking about sexual harassment and discrimination on the basis that what matters most is not upsetting anyone. I have focused on finding the “right words,” the “right time” to talk about gender issues.

But I have observed the ways in which gender (and race, and sexuality) continues to shape who is in power and whose contributions get counted in the tech industry, in ethical AI. Even when it comes to the “right” way to talk about gender issues, I can’t help but notice how different “right” looks for men as compared with women, and for white women as compared with women of colour. Increasingly, men are publicly identifying as champions of change for women: they sign panel pledges, join initiatives pursuing gender equality, demand equal representation, and it’s seen as a career booster. Women demand change too forcefully and are labelled bullies, drama queens, reprimanded for their over-inflated sense of self-importance. Women of colour are vilified and hunted. And women who stay silent in the face of all this, as I have, implicitly endorse the status quo, often finding themselves swallowed up by it anyway. If my daughter grows up to be interested in tech, these are not the experiences I want her to have. I want her to be unafraid to speak up, to demand our attention. I want her to be seen, and I want her to speak up for others.

If there is no “right” way as a woman to speak about gender issues — if there is no “right” way for a woman to take up space, to take credit — then silence won’t serve me or save me either. The only way forward from here is to start speaking. •

This essay is republished from GriffithReview 64: The New Disruptors, edited by Ashley Hay.

The post Computer says no appeared first on Inside Story.

There is the campaign you see via the mainstream media: on radio news and talkback; on television, still dominated by free-to-air channels; and in “legacy” newspapers, now commonly consulted via the web unless you’re taking a flight and have picked up a freebie. Through this lens, the campaign is a familiar-enough beast: indeed, in outward appearance, it hasn’t changed all that much in recent decades.

The candidates, along with a kind of mobile press gallery, travel here and there on buses and planes. Press conferences are held, high-vis vests are donned, streets are walked, hospitals, schools, pubs and shopping malls are visited. The selfies are a gesture to modern times, but the essential rituals would be recognisable to, say, a party leader from the 1970s. Having come back from a desert island, they might wonder what happened to Kerry Packer and the Bulletin, but the outlines would be more or less recognisable.

The second vantage point intersects with the mainstream media in all kinds of ways, but it also has a more or less independent existence. This is the campaign on social media. I don’t mean the formal campaigning that parties and other groups run via Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. Rather, I mean the more informal exchanges between journalists, politicians and ordinary citizens. I am thinking especially of Twitter.

Twitter is both a democratic and a hierarchical medium of exchange. It is more democratic than old media in its lack of filters. Within the laws of defamation and the rules of Twitter itself, you can say whatever you like. It is a cross between the letters page of a newspaper and a toilet wall, with many features of the latter because no editors are selecting, editing and curating contributions. And sometimes neither the spelling nor the grammar are all that great.

But Twitter is also deeply hierarchical. Those with large numbers of followers have much more clout and status. Celebrity types will chat amiably with one another in public while ignoring the great unwashed. The medium has its “influencers,” those who, through their prestige and reach, are considered capable of shaping the tastes, opinions or behaviour of tens of thousands while the rest of us struggle to influence our kids to put down their mobile devices for a while and read a book.

Journalists themselves have a liminal status in this world. Most of them have much more capacity than the rest of us to attract followers. This is a fascinating and under-recognised way for the legacy media — especially the newspapers — to continue to exercise a wider influence over politics and culture. Here, even journalists of the third or fourth rank can have many thousands of Twitter followers, while those who have achieved a genuine celebrity status might have 100,000 or more.

A few examples will suffice. Leigh Sales, who presents the ABC’s 7.30, has 367,000 followers; 7.30 itself has just 162,000. Laura Tingle, also of 7.30, has 115,000 followers. Barrie Cassidy’s 130,000 is more than double that of the program he hosts, the ABC’s Insiders. Annabel Crabb, another ABC television personality, has a remarkable 480,000 followers; interestingly, her stock-in-trade is presenting the more civil and human side of our politicians. Leading Radio National presenters Fran Kelly (76,000), Patricia Karvelas (51,000) and Phillip Adams (35,000) are also popular Twitter identities.

At the commercials, the picture is pretty similar. Chris Uhlmann, formerly of the ABC and now political editor of Nine News, has 151,000 followers, David Speers at Sky 113,000 and Phillip Coorey at the Australian Financial Review 106,000. Nor do you have to work for a large media company if you have the profile, prestige and respect built up over the decades to help you along. Michelle Grattan (the Conversation) and Paul Bongiorno (the Saturday Paper) have well over 100,000 followers each.

In Murdochland, Chris Kenny of the Australian and Sky, who pops up frequently on Twitter if only to criticise it, is approaching 40,000. Miranda Devine of the tabloid Daily Telegraph has over 60,000 followers, and Sharri Markson, of the same paper, about half that number. But lower-profile journalists for publications such as the Australian, the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age — those who would not normally be recognised in the street — will pick up 8000 to 16,000 followers if they are active on the platform. Old hands, such as Paul Kelly, can afford to stay off it entirely.

What does all of this mean? First, a number of journalists have been able to leverage a celebrity status of sorts in a way available to few others — with the notable exception of the politicians themselves. There was a time when very few journalists achieved anything like this kind of profile: think Alan Reid, Alan Ramsey, Paul Kelly, Michelle Grattan and Laurie Oakes.

Individual journalists have their own brand that is connected with, but also independent of, the media company for which they work. A good illustration of the phenomenon is Mike Carlton, who has not for some time worked for a major media company, and yet has 122,000 followers (and a very active account). When journalists cease to work for a big concern, they take their followers with them. Samantha Maiden, formerly of the Daily Telegraph and Sky, has over 100,000 followers, surely an asset for the smaller online outfit, the New Daily, that now employs her.

This is the upside for your average journalist. You can use the platform to build up individual profile, draw attention to your own stories, disseminate opinion, promote a book, and bond with or abuse other members of your craft. Journalists also sometimes draw on Twitter for material and sources. But there is a downside, too.

Best known is the abuse and trolling. Journalists are not the only targets, of course, but they are vulnerable to it, especially if they are also female. There’s a lot of hate out there in the age of Trump. This abuse can be vicious and frightening.

But Twitter also discomforts journalists in other ways. It allows their readers to provide a running commentary on their performance. And it is easy enough to see why this might be so frustrating.

This is an industry in what now seems to be a permanent state of crisis. It is struggling to evolve a business model that will preserve what’s most important in journalism while also turning a profit. The elite might be well paid and secure, but life is harder for others, some of whom are churning out thousands of words a week while shouty op-ed columnists, who don’t have to chase stories or even get basic facts right, attract the fame and the money.

Journalists were on the receiving end of a Twitter pile-on during the Barnaby Joyce affair of 2018, when many tweeters came round to the view that mainstream reporters had conspired to keep the matter under wraps. Certainly, some aspects of the matter had done the rounds on Twitter and on some small independent news sites well before the Daily Telegraph’s front-page story announced open season. But this pattern was not unusual even before the age of the internet and social media. Britain’s Profumo affair of 1963 — the most famous political sex scandal of them all — came to light in a low-circulation Westminster newsletter before it made its way into the headlines of newspapers around the world.

The present election campaign is generating similar complaints. The recent focus has been on “Watergate,” a controversy about the sale of water to the government by a company registered in the Cayman Islands with which energy minister Angus Taylor has had a previous association. Taylor’s evasive answers to questioning about the matter have not helped his or the government’s case that there is nothing to see here. The frequent complaint on Twitter is that mainstream media have shown insufficient interest in the matter. This is part of a more general complaint that Scott Morrison is getting an easy run from the media than Bill Shorten is, and that the media concerns itself with campaign trivia rather than policy substance.

Such complaints are sometimes misplaced. Individual journalists receive criticism for what is seen as a wider failing of the media as a whole. Critics can have precious little understanding of defamation law, the code of ethics, the need for careful corroboration, or the constraints of time and resources. Journalists on the prime minister’s campaign bus have been condemned for being co-opted, rather as journalists in the press gallery are often seen to be too close to politicians and their staffers — as if it were not the very function of the gallery to facilitate such contact. Patricia Karvelas was even criticised for receiving a text message from Barnaby Joyce while she was on Insiders, as if there was something sinister about a politician having the mobile number of a journalist and vice versa.

All the same, it is absurd for journalists to take the substantial benefits from a platform like Twitter while making too much of the brickbats. There is nothing more ridiculous than a high-profile figure with thousands of followers using Twitter to ridicule Twitter — for instance, as unrepresentative of wider bodies of opinion, or as notably lacking in consistency or self-awareness (failings not unknown in politics and journalism).

I’m not sure, either, why anyone should expect a toning down of partisanship on social media, least of all in an election campaign. We might all like more civility, as well as a greater willingness to see the strengths in one another’s arguments. But we also need to be realistic about how much of this we are going to get. There is already too little civility in public discourse more generally, as well as a declining respect for either evidence or expertise, including among some who call themselves journalists.

Appearances matter. Media defensiveness can come across as condescending and elitist. The ordinary camaraderie among fellow members of a profession can, to an outsider, look masonic. (We academics understand this only too well — journalists have even been known to resort to intemperate abuse of dwellers in the ivory tower.) Ordinary human feeling between journalists, politicians and staffers who share a workplace can look like an exclusive and insular club, especially when accompanied by the use of matey nicknames.

But if you are going to accept the celebrity status, however minor, and the pleasures and benefits that come with it — the show on which many of them appear is called Insiders, for God’s sake — best be aware that you might be seen by those outside the tent as a little too cosily placed within it. And the reality is that some journalists are indeed too cosy in there. A few are essentially players rather than analysts, enjoying their role in factional power plays and making their reputations by publishing the titbits provided by their “contacts” who then deploy their stories as guided missiles in party warfare.

Public suspicion is hardly surprising at a time when research tells us that people’s trust in politics and politicians is at a very low ebb. The state of the media as a whole — quite apart from the actions of any individual journalist — has given ordinary voters good reason to be suspicious. The Nine–Fairfax merger brings a former federal Coalition treasurer to the chairmanship of the board of the combined company. News Corp no longer even feigns fairness or balance and is campaigning aggressively for the Coalition. Stories circulate about the role of media magnates in the overthrow of Malcolm Turnbull. And the ABC has been subjected to a bitter and unrelenting campaign of intimidation by the government, supported by the ever-helpful Murdoch press. Ordinary citizens can be forgiven for thinking that there is now more minding of p’s and q’s than is healthy in a public broadcaster.

Twitter has changed the landscape for political reporting, and this is something that journalists have to suck up, whether they like it or not. That — or stay off the platform entirely, an option very few have so far shown any inclination to take up. If journalists want the profile that Twitter both delivers and measures, they have to deal with the reality that they will not always be showered with empathy or understanding, let alone the bouquets of an adoring public. Democracy has many virtues — including its premium on freedom of expression — but no one has ever claimed that it is always fair. •

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Do you recognise this world? You do? Maybe you’re a North Korean dissident, or a refugee who fled Stalin’s Russia. Or maybe you’ve just got home from work.

“Most workers,” argues the American philosopher Elizabeth Anderson in her provocative new book, “are governed by communist dictatorships in their working lives.” When we enter our workplaces we enter a system of private government. And it’s not a pretty sight: the private governments of the past were run by leaders who took power by force or by birth; the private governments of today are run by CEOs.

Taking her examples from American sources, Anderson tells of poultry processors forced to wear adult nappies because they are denied toilet breaks; sweatshop conditions in Californian garment factories; astounding levels of sexual harassment in restaurants across the nation; out-and-out wage theft in many industries; and Amazon warehouse workers suffering under heatwave conditions because management wouldn’t install air conditioning. (To be fair, they did organise for ambulances to ferry the workers who collapsed from heat stroke to hospital.)

Of course, these are the extreme examples. But the system of control, Anderson says, is near universal. Big Brother is boss, and if you don’t like it, there’s the door.

Western governments might be democratic in nature, but when we pass through those ubiquitous security gates into the place where we spend a third of our lives, our corporate lanyards round our necks, we surrender to a system of government that Henry Tudor would recognise and approve of.

Philosophers love their thought experiments, and Anderson’s is a doozy. She describes something familiar in a new way and the scales fall from your hitherto unseeing eyes. After reading her book your workplace will never look quite the same again. Men and women might be born free, but everywhere they are chained to their cubicles.

Journalist and screenwriter Dan Lyons would agree. He’s spent the last couple of years journeying through the work gulags of modern capitalism, talking to dissidents on the shop floor and hubristic managers in the corner offices, and he’s come back a modern-day Solzhenitsyn.

Lyons is no philosopher, or sociologist for that matter, but he is funny — and he’s pissed off. Once a successful journalist, he was disrupted out of a job he loved at Newsweek, ended up working at a tech start-up staffed by enthusiastic millennials, wrote a jaundiced book about his experiences (naturally enough called Disrupted), and ended up contributing to the hit HBO comedy Silicon Valley.

You’d think he’d be content now, but Lyons is having none of that. He’s convinced that modern work practices are making people seriously unhappy, and he thinks it’s all the fault of his traditional enemies: those smug oligarchs who run Big Tech. Lab Rats is the result of this personal crusade.

Because Big Tech companies are powerful and successful, how they do things is copied shamelessly by many other companies hoping to emulate their share prices. As a long-time critic of Silicon Valley’s culture, Lyons is convinced that the industry’s influence on the happiness of modern workers will reach far beyond a pocket of California.

Big Tech loves cheap workers. Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google — the so-called FANGs — are all big companies with relatively small workforces, mostly made up of contractors. For Lyons, the growing use of contract workers, pioneered by tech companies like Lyft and Uber, is making job security a thing of the past.

And Big Tech also loves change, at least on its own terms. Unfortunately, that’s not so good for workers. As Lyons points out, “being exposed to persistent, low-grade change leads to depression and anxiety. The suffering is akin to what we experience after the death of a loved one or spending time in combat.”

Move fast and break things, as the Facebook motto had it. Even lives.

Uncovering the dark side of Silicon Valley is becoming a journalistic industry. In Brotopia, the American TV reporter Emily Chang, presenter and executive producer of Bloomberg Technology, examines how the tech industry treats women. Her tales show job discrimination, investor prejudice, and a culture of sexual politics that would look more at home in parts of the National Rugby League.

The chapter of Chang’s book that got a lot of publicity (including an extract in Vanity Fair) when it was first published in the United States dealt with the anonymous sources who told her about the sex parties held by the upper echelons of the tech business. The sense of entitlement among powerful men is, of course, an old and dismaying story. But the CEOs, founders, venture capitalists and paper billionaires of the Valley have given it a new twist. Perhaps because they were virginal nerds in high school and university, they somehow feel they have earnt the right to run a tech version of the Playboy mansion circa 1972, but with more money, better drugs and even less duty of care.

It’s the same kind of self-justifying ideology used to disrupt legacy businesses or claim that the gig economy is an improvement on that old-fashioned notion, workers’ rights.

Chang’s book also reports on the structural issues that bedevil the tech sector. Despite playing an important role in the creation of the industry, women are woefully underrepresented in its workforce. According to Chang, not only are there too few female coders, developers, CEOs and venture capitalists in tech, but there is also no real commitment to overcoming the deficiency.

In an otherwise interesting and well-researched book, Chang does seem to miss one of the most important issues arising from the Valley’s woman problem. As Safiya Umoja Noble shows in another recent book, Algorithms of Oppression, the programming choices that lie at the heart of the whole enterprise are often hopelessly biased against women and minorities, mainly because they are written by a very narrow cohort of white, Ivy League–educated men.

So, what kind of shop floor of the future are these men creating?

One day a software programmer in Los Angeles called Ibrahim Diallo turned up to work to find that his security pass didn’t work. Luckily the security guard recognised him and let him in. Then his computer wouldn’t let him log on. His supervisor sent an email to HR to sort things out. She got back a computer-generated reply saying that he was no longer a “valid employee.” Diallo had been fired by a computer.

Because of a software malfunction, Diallo spent three frustrating weeks without a job and without pay. A minor Kafkaesque moment in the history of industrial relations, you might say. But Dan Lyons says it’s a parable of what’s already happening. “We are meat puppets, tethered to an algorithm,” he writes.

We already have software programs that screen resumés, and irritating workplace surveys run by AI, as well as the widespread use of “continual performance improvement algorithms” that literally monitor a worker’s every move. By creating a new hybrid, part worker, part machine, we run the risk of dehumanising the workplace, says Lyons — with far-reaching psychological effects on workers.

“In my quest to understand the epidemic of worker unhappiness,” writes Lyons, “I’ve come across stressors like dwindling pay cheques, job insecurity and constant, unrelenting change. But [the] fourth and final factor of unhappiness in the workplace — dehumanisation — might be the most dangerous of all.”

An optimist at heart, Lyons says he’s also found signs of a counterrevolution, at least in some companies. There’s the Chicago-based software company Basecamp, which mandates that its staff work only forty hours a week — except in summer, when they take Fridays off. Basecamp’s owners aren’t pursuing world domination, just interesting and fulfilling lives. And, anyway, they’re not short of cash: one of them can still afford to collect racing cars and compete at Le Mans.

Then there’s Managed by Q, a contract-cleaning business, where “everybody cleans,” even the firm’s founder and CEO, who still does shifts scrubbing toilets. Unlike many newly minted companies, Managed by Q doesn’t rely on the gig economy to shave wages and conditions; everyone who cleans also gets health insurance, a pension scheme and stock options.

Lyons argues that companies like these have seen what’s happening in Silicon Valley and then done the opposite. They don’t make Google-sized returns, but their staff turnover is lower, their productivity is higher, and people have fun at work.

The reform that Lyons seems to miss, however, is the most obvious one: collective action. Last November, for example, around 20,000 Google workers staged a walkout protesting at the company’s use of forced arbitration to settle sexual harassment or assault cases instead of allowing its workers to go to court. By February Google had bowed to the pressure and agreed that it would no longer force employees to settle disputes in this way.

As the group that led the campaign, Google Walkout for Real Change, tweeted at the time, “This victory would never have happened if workers hadn’t banded together, supported one another and walked out. Collective action works. Worker power works. This is still just the beginning.” •

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Directly after our evidence, representatives from Facebook and the non-profit Digital Industry Group Inc., or DIGI, were due to have their say. Noticing Mia Garlick, Facebook’s director of policy for Australia and New Zealand, I walked up to introduce myself. She was surrounded by a wall of mostly female staff.

“I just gave evidence,” I said, smiling.

“I heard your evidence,” she said, staring straight at me. She was not smiling.

I’m writing a book about cyberhate, I said, and would like to interview her. Could I have her business card? She said she didn’t have one on her.

“What’s the best way to get in touch, then?” I asked. “Can I get your email address?”

My paper and pen were poised. But she didn’t start spelling out her email address. She paused and mumbled something about how I could get it from Jenna Price. “She’s got it,” Garlick snapped, and it was clear our conversation was over.

This brief interaction turned out to be a marker of what was to come. Beyond public relations spin, it’s hard to get any real, in-depth and on-the-record answers from the social media companies about how they are tackling cyberhate. Despite their insistence on being platforms for and champions of free speech — “Twitter stands for freedom of expression for everyone!” — they are hell-bent on controlling the message and remain largely unwilling to be held to account.

Lawyer Josh Bornstein believes social media companies should be liable for cyberhate, and if they were we’d see a radical change in their behaviour. “If they had a duty of care, then I think their corporate behaviour would be very different.” Similar calls for legislated duty of care are coming from Europe. Quite simply, this legislation would put the onus on tech companies “to prevent reasonably foreseeable harms.” And if they didn’t, they would be liable.

Predictably, social media companies aren’t crazy about the idea. As Facebook’s submission to the Australian Senate hearings states: “Given the strong commitment of industry to promote the safety of people when they use our services, we believe that no changes to existing criminal law are required. If anything, we would encourage the Committee to consider carve outs from liability for responsible intermediaries.” In plain English, Facebook isn’t just seeking the status quo — it’s suggesting exemptions from prosecution.

Under the current system in Australia, social media companies are viewed as “partners” of the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, which was established by federal parliament in 2015. But when it comes to cyberbullying they can be given legally binding notices or fines if they don’t comply with requests from the commissioner. “We haven’t had to use our formal powers once,” says commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who spent more than two decades working in policy and safety roles for companies like Microsoft, Twitter and Adobe. She believes that the system of treating social media companies as partners and giving them “the benefit of the doubt” is working. “They don’t want bullying. They don’t want that happening on their platforms.”

Encouragingly, the eSafety Office claims it has a 100 per cent compliance rate when it comes to getting cyberhate taken down. This isn’t to say that Inman Grant thinks the social media companies are at the top of their game when it comes to addressing online harassment. “They’ve made some incremental changes… but they haven’t been monumental changes,” she says. She sees the current historical moment as a “tipping point” of public anger, and is adamant: “We need to see meaningful transparency or radical transparency, if you want to call it that. Online safety is not a destination, it’s a constant journey.”

One of the things the eSafety Commissioner talks passionately about — and I have come to agree with — is a concept she calls “safety by design.” Her idea is that instead of being retrofitted after the damage is done, tech platforms must be engineered to protect us from the get-go. This strikes me as just like cars fitted with mandatory seatbelts and airbags in case we crash while driving them.

To explain what happens in the absence of safety by design, she takes the example of Facebook Live — for her, a “perfect example” of the failure to implement safety by design. When Facebook Live came onto the market, two similar services, Periscope and Meerkat, were already in operation. It should have been clear from their example that user safety would be a major issue. “Why did it take almost a dozen live-streamed rapes, murders and suicides for them [Facebook] to say, ‘Okay, well, we’re going to hire 3000 moderators’? They were so focused on getting out to market and gaining market share that they didn’t do the proper risk mitigation and risk management and try and build those in.”

Facebook responded to this criticism via email, stating: “All new features — including Facebook Live — go through rigorous internal review involving specialist privacy, safety and security teams.”

Neither Facebook nor Twitter agreed to nominate a representative for me to interview on the record. To give Facebook its due, the staff did attempt to answer my direct questions, and had ongoing correspondence and phone calls with me over many weeks. However, both platforms were guilty of providing long, prepared written statements that often smacked of public relations spin. Twitter directly addressed only two issues I raised with them — the first regarding the purchase of advertisements to perpetrate cyberhate, and the second related to outsourcing moderation overseas. My other thirteen questions, based on the comments and experiences I’d gathered for my book, were not directly answered by the platform.

At various times I wrote to both Twitter and Facebook, expressing my frustration at their insistence on tightly managing the message. After months of highly controlled communication with me, a Facebook staff member — who insisted on not being named — asked me why the media doesn’t accurately report on what Facebook is doing in regard to user safety; I nearly laughed.

In part my response reads: “This is all about how much trust is in the bank — which is low at the moment due to issues you are already aware of.” (We had discussed Facebook’s data breaches, and how dimly the public viewed them.) Getting accurate coverage, I explain, is more likely “if you have those human relationships with journalists” and allow leadership to be interviewed because “this gives the appearance of being in open and honest communication with the public.”

After three months of corresponding with Facebook, the company offers me a meeting with Mia Garlick. This is not the interview I’ve requested but it’s better than nothing. Perhaps Garlick won’t remember our last encounter, but on the day I’m nervous. I put on more makeup than usual — my sister fondly calls this my war paint — along with shapewear and a floral shirt.

Most of the building’s occupants are listed in the foyer of this nondescript high-rise in Sydney’s CBD, but not Facebook. Unless you know the address, it’s not easy to find. Beyond the big wooden-framed doors on the eighteenth floor, it’s like a separate universe. Deliberate funkiness. There’s a big wooden “f” on the wall, in Facebook’s signature font, surrounded by fake grass. A clear glass vase of orange orchids stands on the beech-coloured reception desk. Behind the desk is a high wall covered in a huge, modern mural suggesting flowers and vegetation. The phone doesn’t stop ringing.

The receptionist asks me to electronically sign a five-screen-long non-disclosure agreement. This form effectively stops me sharing “confidential information” gleaned in the upcoming meeting. She gives me a green bottle of sparkling water and directs me to a blue-and-grey couch with colour-coordinated throw pillows of different sizes.

Finally, I’m collected from reception by a public relations representative and shown to a boardroom behind glass doors. Floor-to-ceiling windows look over the city. Garlick greets me. She’s wearing a black cardigan with a white top underneath, and a chunky blue ring on her right hand with a wide resin bracelet to match. Her hair slightly slicked back. Startling blue eyes.

There’s a note of tension in the room and I crack a bad joke about having slept badly because of drunk kids in the city. Both Garlick and the PR person laugh politely and visibly relax. The pair of them reiterate the message they’ve given me via email: Nothing is quotable.

And that’s a crying shame because, one by one, Garlick graciously answers every single question that I have. In detail. Unlike the prepared statements Facebook sends me both before and after this meeting, this face-to-face conversation shows Garlick to be authentic. She’s passionate about her work and believes in it. She’s thoughtful and well informed. Her answers — which I’m unable to share, of course — go a long way to making Facebook’s case in relation to what the company is actually doing about cyberhate.

Once a journalist, always a journalist — even in a situation where you can’t quote. During the meeting I take down more than a thousand words of notes. Towards the end of our allocated time, I’m told that if I wish to have these same questions answered officially, I need to send them again via email (for the third time).

Facebook brands itself as a place “where people from all over the world can share and connect.” Clearly, journalists are not the people they have in mind. On the contrary, this rigmarole leaves me with a distinct and unprovable hunch: this unwise attempt at containing the media — and, by proxy, the public — must be deliberate. Is it a directive from the California head office? What other sensible reason could there be for this behaviour?

After witnessing the company’s responses at the Senate hearings and then communicating with it at length myself, it’s hard not to conclude that this obstruction is by design: There’s nothing to see here. Move along. 

Facebook, for example, has consistently denied being a publisher, instead claiming “we are in the business of connecting people and ideas.” “On Facebook,” the company submitted to the Senate, “people choose who to be friend [sic] with, and which Pages or Groups to follow. Consequently, people make a decision about the types of content that they can see in their News Feed… We do not write the posts that people read on our services.”

The issue of whether social media companies are or aren’t publishers is a thorny one, and it’s being debated around the world. The reason for this is that traditional publishers — like newspapers and TV stations — can be held responsible for false, misleading or malicious content shared on their platforms.

Writing in the Guardian, Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, articulated what many people already believe. Social media companies are publishers because they “monetise, host, distribute, produce and even in some cases commission material.” Teasing out why this is a particular problem when it comes to news and information, she continues: “By acting like technology companies, while in fact taking on the role of publishers, Google, Facebook and others, have accidentally designed a system that elevates the cheapest and ‘most engaging’ content at the expense of more expensive but less ‘spreadable’ material.”

Of course, profit is a major factor in tech companies. As Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law at the University of Maryland and author of The Black Box Society explains: “Very often, hate, anxiety and anger drive participation with the platform. Whatever behaviour increases ad revenue will not only be permitted, but encouraged, excepting of course some egregious cases.”

Of course, when I repeatedly put this to Facebook, staff there furiously deny it. One spokeswoman says to me: “Those comments are insulting to the thousands of people who’ve come to work every day [at Facebook] for the last fourteen years — policy people, leadership, safety experts, engineers — to make the platform safer. It’s bad long-term business if people have had a bad experience on our service. If people don’t find Facebook useful, they are not going to use it. Our long-term future is to continue delivering a service that people enjoy and feel safe using.”

Still. Even Twitter’s current CEO, Jack Dorsey, understands his platform has been failing to keep people safe. In a series of tweets from 2017, he said, “We see voices being silenced on Twitter every day. We’ve been working to counteract this for the past two years… We prioritised this in 2016. We updated our policies and increased the size of our teams. It wasn’t enough.” •

This is an edited extract from Troll Hunting, published last month by Hardie Grant.

The post The tight-lipped champions of free speech appeared first on Inside Story.

The web’s decentralised character was foundational to its very conception. As Tim Berners-Lee had declared on one of the World Wide Web’s first pages, there would be “no top to the web.” In its first major decision on regulation of internet content, the US Supreme Court predicted in 1997 that each of us would become a “town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox.”

And yet here we are. On the one hand, the power of the old media monopolies is as malign as ever; on the other, the new monopolies have introduced us to fresh iniquities. Twenty-eighteen saw Mark Zuckerberg appear before the US Congress to apologise for not doing enough to stop fake news, foreign interference in elections, hate speech, and the unfortunate matter of a third party accessing the private data of eighty-seven million people. Back among the old media, last year’s highlight was the ousting of Malcolm Turnbull, assisted by a sustained campaign from the Murdoch tabloids, Sky News and the Australian. Reports soon emerged that Murdoch himself, after arriving in town eleven days earlier, had declared “Malcolm has got to go,” and that the besieged prime minister had desperately phoned the mogul to plead his case. As Kevin Rudd wrote in August, Murdoch remains “the greatest cancer on Australian democracy.”

Rather than giving birth to a plethora of cottage industries, the internet has turned out to be a monopolist’s paradise. Whether it’s Facebook in social media, Google in search, Amazon in online shopping, Ebay in online auctions or Netflix in online streaming, immensely powerful incumbents dominate market niches and competition takes place on anything but a level playing field. Every month, as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission reported in December, “approximately nineteen million Australians use Google Search, seventeen million access Facebook, seventeen million watch YouTube (which is owned by Google) and eleven million access Instagram (which is owned by Facebook).” Around 94 per cent of online searches are made through Google, and the company enjoys corresponding market power in search advertising. Google and Facebook alone earn well over half of the $8 billion spent advertising online in Australia.

Matthew Hindman’s achievement in The Internet Trap is to advance a thoroughgoing explanation of why the internet has so comprehensively disappointed the early hopes and expectations — and why those who plead that it just needs more time are misguided. The internet’s tendency to monopoly is not an aberration, Hindman argues; it is a product of the basic economic forces that are permanent features of digital life.

Hindman takes as his starting point the apparently solid basis of our erstwhile optimism: where print, radio and TV required massive investment in capital equipment, the internet reduced the cost of reproducing and distributing information to close to zero. As the American communications scholar Clay Shirky reasonably asked, “What happens when there is nothing unique about publishing anymore, because users can do it for themselves”? The blogosphere looked like the answer. In 2005 it was estimated that thirty-five million Americans were reading blogs, and that an even greater number of blogs were in existence.

To be sure, it remained costly to produce high-quality content, but the internet appeared to be breaking down even that barrier to entry. As Yochai Benkler explained in The Wealth of Networks, the web enabled widely dispersed voluntary effort to be coordinated efficiently to create content as compelling as it is popular. Wikipedia wasn’t just outcompeting Britannica; studies were finding it similarly reliable. As Clay Shirky pronounced in the title of his 2008 book, “here comes everybody.”

But this kind of thinking rested on a basic conceptual mistake. It conflated speaking with being heard. Yes, it’s cheap as chips to start a blog. But gaining an audience? That costs. Digital survival depends on what Hindman calls stickiness — a “firm’s ability to attract users, to get them to stay longer, and to make them return again and again.” Once we think about the cost of distribution in these terms it becomes apparent that it is not only really, really expensive, but it also exhibits economies of scale no less steep than those of print media. “Critically, many tactics that promote stickiness get cheaper per user as sites get bigger,” says Hindman. And much of The Internet Trap is devoted to explaining why the cost per unit decreases in cyberspace as the scale of production increases ad infinitum, inevitably resulting in monopolies.

Some of the advantages of scale in the digital economy are already generally appreciated. Like the telephone, a social network becomes more valuable the more widely it is adopted. The best feature of Facebook is that everybody is there, which means that any would-be competitor has to do more than simply come up with a better product. It has to persuade potential customers to join a network where they risk not finding the people they want to connect to.

Other economies of scale documented by Hindman are less widely understood. He tells how, in early 2000, Google conducted one of its first live online experiments to find out the optimal number of results users preferred in response to search queries. Users were randomly assigned to receive twenty, twenty-five or thirty results. What Google discovered was that traffic declined precipitously among the groups with more results. “Searches in the thirty-result group had fallen by more than 20 per cent, and tens of thousands of users had abandoned Google altogether…” The ultimate diagnosis was that more results slowed response time — only by half a second, mind you, but enough for users to get frustrated and go elsewhere. These findings, widely corroborated, underscore how speed is one of the fundamental building blocks of stickiness.

While speed derives from a very clever algorithm, it also depends on capital-intensive industrial plant. Hindman points to Google’s mega data centre in Oregon, and fifteen like it running worldwide, which together “represent a jaw-droppingly massive investment, larger than the GDP of more than 100 countries.” It is here that we have to dispense with the mythology that the internet is a post-industrial technology. “Google’s facility is exactly what it looks like: an industrial mill, a digital smelter refining not ore but information,” writes Hindman. “Google’s data factories are just as critical for it today as broadcast equipment was for NBC in an earlier era.” This massive data processing capacity gives Google a critical speed advantage over competitors at a lower cost per user. And the energy efficiency of the massive servers run by firms like Google and Facebook dwarf the industry standard.

“Debates about the internet still often start with talk about the medium’s ‘openness,’ about how the ‘peer to peer’ architecture the Internet treats all websites equally,” says Hindman. But when the bandwidth of a corporate behemoth like Google equates to all the bandwidth between Europe and the United States, such talk is increasingly obsolete. As Hindman explains, “content delivery networks and paid peering mean that big sites take a shortcut to users.” In other words, the internet is less a web than an information superhighway after all.

Google’s search-results experiment illustrates yet another benefit of scale. Large sites have the necessary engineering expertise, infrastructure and user base to continuously run large-scale online experiments. When even small design changes can have substantial effects on users’ propensity to stay and return, large firms leave nothing to chance, using comparison testing to definitively determine the optimal approach. These experiments increase audience stickiness and substantially reduce the risk of a new product or feature failing.

Compounding other advantages enjoyed by big sites, the power of brands and our preference for the familiar are as pronounced online as elsewhere. We gravitate to sites we have learned how to use. And the digital heavyweights not only achieve audience growth at a lower cost than smaller competitors, they can sell their audiences to advertisers at much higher prices — because scale enables them to offer more precise targeting and more effective measurement tools.

“With so many strong economies of scale, of so many different types, in so many different areas of digital media,” Hindman concludes, “it is time to stop pretending that the internet is a level playing field.”

To illustrate the point, Hindman tells the story of Campus Network, a student-created social networking site that took Columbia University by storm in 2004. Within a month of its launch, “most students on campus were posting photos and blogs and polls, sharing music and upcoming events, and commenting on their friends’ activities. After conversations with Silicon Valley luminaries, such as Napster creator Sean Parker, the site expanded to many other campuses. The founder dropped out of school to work on the site full time. Soon the nascent social network had hundreds of thousands of users.”

Campus Network ended up folding in 2006. Today, around 2.3 billion of earth’s 7.7 billion inhabitants use another social network created in 2004, Facebook. (Of the 5.4 billion non-Facebook users, 3.5 billion are not even connected to the internet and well over a billion live in China, where it is blocked.) What explains the very different fates of the two companies? Campus Network was actually better than Facebook in some respects, says Hindman. From the start, it had features like blogging and cross-profile discussion, which Facebook didn’t offer. On the flipside, Facebook looked nicer and was easier to sign up to, and we could also speculate that its brand name afforded an easier journey when it expanded beyond its university origins.

But when we scrutinise the myriad possible explanations for Facebook’s ultimate and total victory, says Hindman, it’s easy to miss the woods for the trees. Facebook’s real advantage over Campus Network was that it got its nose in front. It vigorously pursued venture capital and advertising revenue in a way Campus Network didn’t, enabling Zuckerberg’s outfit to hire and expand faster. Once that happened, Facebook began enjoying economies of scale that its rivals didn’t have. Before long, the leading firm in the market was the only firm.

At one level, we only have to look to see that companies like Facebook and Google are gargantuan monopolies. And yet the internet of our imaginations — where attention flows freely and competition is only a click away — can prevent us from seeing what is right in front of our noses. Hindman’s clear theoretical exposition equips us to confront the empirical reality: the internet giants are natural monopolies. Following from that, governments need to start treating them as such — by much more aggressively prosecuting anti-competitive behaviour, for instance.

And yet, as disillusioned about the internet as we might be, the techno-optimists of the nineties and noughties got something right. As Nicholas Negroponte foresaw, we do indeed curate our daily news from an extraordinary variety of sources, limited by little more than our imaginations. In keeping with the future envisaged in the 1990s by the US Supreme Court, we can all be microbloggers publishing to an audience of potentially global reach (even if the publishing platforms we use are owned by remarkably few people).

In other words, monopoly internet platforms are perfectly compatible with radical content diversity. In fact, as Hindman shows, content personalisation and recommendation systems are crucial ingredients of audience stickiness that large firms can do better, cheaper. This is not just because personalisation requires massive investments in both hardware and software; it’s also because the capacity of an algorithm to accurately match content to a user’s preferences grows as more data from a larger user base is fed into it. It’s one more factor stacking the odds against would-be competitors to the Facebooks and Twitters.

Mark Zuckerberg’s monopoly is problematic in many ways but — by its nature — it is host to an immense diversity of independently published content. So why hasn’t that diminished our concern that powerful proprietors of old, like Rupert Murdoch can set the agenda of public discourse and exert excessive leverage over decision-makers? If we can all see and say anything we like on new media platforms, why hasn’t Rupert Murdoch’s voice become just another cry in the agora?

This question is further urged by the commercial fortunes of news publishers. Today, we worry less that they are monopolies than that they are going broke because they have lost so much revenue to Facebook, Google and online classifieds. If the news proprietors of old are so weakened, surely their hold on democratic life should have been loosened too?

If such a transformation is occurring then it is very hard to make out. As the editor of the Sun, Tony Gallagher, texted moments after Britain voted to leave the European Union and following months of ceaseless campaigning by his and other British tabloids: “so much for the waning power of the print media.” Indeed, between Brexit and the Iraq war, the ousting of Malcolm Turnbull and the defeat of Neil Kinnock (“It’s the Sun Wot Won It”), more continuity than change is apparent, notwithstanding the surrounding disruption of the intervening years.

How can this be? In this respect, Hindman could have more extensively delineated between the fate of platforms and publishers, but his basic arguments still go a long way. We might all have an equal capacity to publish on Facebook, but what matters is our ability to recruit and maintain an audience. That is distributed unequally because it requires intensive capital investment and hugely favours scale. Big publishers thus enjoy a decisive advantage over small ones, just as small publishers enjoy an advantage over readers. In print or online, “survival of the fattest” is still the law of the newspaper jungle. This unequal capacity to command an audience — to be heard — accounts for the enduring chokehold of the media barons over political life.

By adding Hindman’s analysis to what we already know, the major economic forces facing the news industry can be summarised: high capital requirements and powerful economies of scale together with diminishing total revenue and an increased proportion of that revenue coming from subscriptions (rather than advertising). Most likely to prosper are large news organisations with a global reach that appeal to a specific shade of opinion: think the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the New York Times. It’s a news ecosystem that can produce a hundred different flavours on Trump’s latest tweet but is less likely than ever to uncover corruption at the local council. What incentive is there to break news for a micro-audience that can’t offer the advantages of scale (especially when Google and Facebook are better at targeting advertising to local and hyperlocal audiences)?

One public policy takeaway is that Australia likely needs more extensive subsidies for local news and investigative journalism than the $60 million the federal government is delivering over the course of 2018 and 2019. It is a good thing that the ACCC’s Digital Platform Inquiry is contemplating such a move. The Canadian government’s recent announcement of a $600 million package of support for its media sector is one example we might look to, as well as the longstanding tradition of public support for journalism in much of Europe. The deeper lesson from Matthew Hindman’s illuminating book is that an egalitarian information environment depends as much on access to an audience as the capacity to publish; on the economics of attention as much as the tools of communication. •

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If this path is pursued, it could dramatically change how the digital media are shaping politics, society and democracy. It could match the mammoth effort that resulted in our system of copyright regulation.

But this is a big “if,” and success depends on whether the ACCC sticks to its guns and governments have the will to act. On the latter, recent history doesn’t inspire confidence.

We are, the ACCC says, at a “critical time… Digital platforms have fundamentally changed the way we interact with news, with each other and with government and business.” The ACCC comprehensively rejects the disingenuous claims of Google and Facebook that they are neither publishers nor media companies, but simply technology companies. Google and Facebook have used this fig leaf to avoid any suggestion, worldwide, that they should accept the responsibilities and regulations that usually apply to media.

The ACCC says that they are, in fact, much more than distributors

Digital platforms actively participate in the online news ecosystem by performing a wide range of functions other than news referral services, some of which overlap with the functions of media businesses. This means that digital platforms are considerably more than mere distributors or pure intermediaries in the supply of news and journalistic content in Australia.

Google, says the ACCC, is attempting to position itself as “the source of all information, and for news stories… an intermediary between consumers and providers of news and journalism.”

Dealing with Google and Facebook is more or less compulsory if news media companies want to reach audiences, says the ACCC. Yet the two giants also make it much harder for media companies to make money from journalism.

Traditionally, we have not looked to the ACCC — the ultimate dry-as-dust market regulator — for an understanding of hard-to-measure things like the civic importance of journalism. In its history of scrutinising media mergers, it has tended to talk of dollars, cents and markets for advertising, and little else.

We saw a change (though sadly with little effect) in the ACCC’s recent scrutiny of the Nine–Fairfax merger, where the talk, for the first time, was of the “market for news and information” — a concept dizzyingly close to the “market for ideas.”

In this report, the theme swells. The ACCC gets how journalism matters, and it understands the profound impact Google and Facebook have had. “News and journalism generate broad benefits for society through the production and dissemination of knowledge, the exposure of corruption, and holding governments and other decision makers to account,” it says, before drawing on the academic and industry literature to parse the different kinds of journalism and their importance to the public interest.

The report contains alarming data on the shift of advertising revenue from print media to online, and the losses of journalistic jobs that have resulted. Revenue from journalism began to fall in 2001 as classified advertisements became unbundled from the physical artefact of the newspaper. That transformation was completed more than a decade ago, but news media revenue has continued to decline. The report contains a particularly striking graph showing print media advertising dropping off a cliff in 2014.

Data provided to the ACCC by media companies show that, compared with 2014, there are now 20 per cent fewer journalists employed in what were once newspapers and are now print and online news media companies. That is a dramatic change to a key component of our democracy. And this has happened, as the ACCC notes, when the country’s population and economy have both been growing strongly.

While the new web-based entrants to news media — such as the Guardian Australia and BuzzFeed — have made important contributions to diversity, they have not gone close to offsetting what has been lost. According to the ACCC, six of the larger “digital natives,” with a combined audience of close to five million, collectively employ fewer than 250 full-time editorial staff. None of them reports local news.

The inevitable result, says the report, will be a reduction in public interest journalism. This has big implications. “Even those members of the public that do not read, watch or listen to the news benefit from the role journalism performs in exposing corruption, the creation of public debate and holding governments, corporations and individuals to account through their questioning and investigation.”

Within this changed media landscape, half of all traffic to news websites comes from either Google or Facebook, giving the two behemoths a potentially crushing market power. Says the ACCC: “While the digital platforms clearly value the news media content which they are able to display to their users, Google and Facebook each appear to be more important to the major news media businesses than any one news media business is to Google or Facebook.”

A key concern is lack of transparency about the algorithms that govern which citizens receive which news media content in their feeds. This means false news, political manipulation and “filter bubbles,” in which extreme opinions and tainted news are served to those most likely to seize on them, can all grow without society being able to counter or even scrutinise them.

So what does the ACCC recommend be done about this?

First, it suggests a change to merger law that would allow it to prevent Google and Facebook from gobbling up potential competitors rather than only those companies that already compete with them.

More significantly, it recommends a new market regulator with the power to investigate and demand information, including on those all-important algorithms that govern what news we read.

Finally, the ACCC recommends a separate, independent and comprehensive review of media regulation with the aim of designing a new framework of platform-neutral, modern and fit-for-purpose media regulation.

At this point in my reading, I felt like cheering. But it takes us back to that big “if” in my introduction. Will governments act? Will this report join the many others that have fallen into the dust?

The report lists more than thirty inquiries into aspects of the media and its regulation conducted by Australian governments and parliaments over the past twenty years. Most have done serious work and issued serious recommendations, only to be comprehensively ignored by governments lacking the political will to take on media barons.

Highlights (or lowlights, depending on your point of view) include the Convergence Review in 2012, the Finkelstein report into news media regulation, also in 2012, a brace of reports by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, and more recently the report of the Senate Committee into the Future of Public Interest Journalism — which was already something of a zombie before it reported because its prime movers (Nick Xenophon, Sam Dastyari and Scott Ludlam) had trouble staying in parliament.

The last of those reports was one of the prods for the current ACCC inquiry, which began in December last year. And the ghosts of these previous inquiries live on in the ACCC report, which references them, picks up on key recommendations and pushes forward.

For example, the ACCC wants the new system of regulation of Google and Facebook to apply to all digital platforms that distribute news and media content and earn more than $100 million in the Australian market. The late, lamented Convergence Review — ignored by governments after its release in 2012 — also recommended a revenue-level determinant for who gets regulated, rather than the outdated platform-based approach.

The ACCC also foreshadows the issues it is considering making recommendations on in its final report, due in June next year, on which submissions are invited. Among these are the recommendations of the Future of Public Interest Journalism inquiry for news subscriptions to be tax-deductible for all consumers, and for investment in journalism to attract tax offsets.

Oddly, the report doesn’t pick up on the suggestions that donations to not-for-profit journalism enterprises be tax-deductible. While the report notes the impact of philanthropy and crowdfunding on journalism, it neglects this aspect. It does express a preference for tax measures to assist journalism, rather than direct grants or subsidies from government — though it says it welcomes submissions on grants as well.

And it signals a review of the regional and small publishers innovation fund — which was a $16 million sop government gave to publishers in the wake of removing restrictions on concentration of ownership. The ACCC basically wants to know whether this has worked, and whether it should be continued.

For what it is worth, my sources suggest that while the cadetship and scholarship parts of the program are valued, the innovation fund is so restricted in its requirements that it has failed to attract many applications. Publishers can apply for “efficiency measures, digital projects and revenue development projects” but not for what is most needed — a reporter or two to sit in court, get to the school fete or attend the local council meeting.

Meanwhile, the ACCC report suggests that any benefits under new tax laws be confined to journalism enterprises that meet certain standards. Pushing this idea further, it says it will consider recommending that Google and Facebook be required to badge news media content that comes from organisations that have signed up to standards and journalistic codes of practice. This is a ghost of some of the suggestions in the Finkelstein inquiry.

Combined, the tax and “trust badge” measures suggest that the Australian Press Council might get a fillip to its membership. At present, not all the new entrants to the media market have signed up. If the ACCC pushes through with these suggestions and they are adopted, the benefits of signing up to industry self-regulation schemes will include a badge of trustworthiness on Google and Facebook, and access to tax breaks.

There is much more in this report, and in accompanying documents that contain ACCC-commissioned research on how Australians are accessing news media and what they value. This is valuable stuff.

Some snippets: Just over half of Australians believe the news they consume is trustworthy — but only 36 per cent think that the news other Australians consume is trustworthy. The things that most build trust in news outlets are accurate reporting, reporting that is neutral and unbiased, and independence from political and government interests. Public broadcasters are also likely to be trusted. Less important in building trust was familiarity with the journalists employed by the outlet.

Other dismal figures include the fact that three-fifths of Australians don’t pay for news in any form, and most of these say they won’t pay for it in the future. This is where a tax deduction might make a difference.

On the upside, over three-quarters of Australians believe news services are important to them for engaging in Australian society. They value national and local news, and news about politics. The most valued categories of news include health; the environment; science and technology; crime, justice and security; Australian politics; news about particular industries; and “news of the day.”

The report also looks at privacy and how much consumers know and care about the data that Google and Facebook collect and hold about them. Here I have concentrated on the implications for news and journalism. And that leads back to the question of what will become of all this work. What can we expect of whichever government is in place when the final ACCC report hits in June?

The current communications minister, Mitch Fifield, has been at the centre of the leadership disruption that has crippled the current government. During his term he has continued the trend of removing outdated regulations without apparently considering that something more up-to-date might be needed to replace them. He has also been responsible for the “captain’s picks” that left us with an ABC board that lacks legitimacy. It would be astonishing if he had much headspace or political will left for taking on Google and Facebook.

Meanwhile, the shadow minister for communications, Michelle Rowland, is believed to be trawling among academics and others for policy ideas. The ACCC has given her plenty to chew on, but she is not a senior player in what is likely to be the incoming government. The ACCC report calls for a new regulator and a comprehensively new approach to media regulation, plus tax measures and participation in an international effort. If this is to come to anything, the most senior levels of an incoming government will need to get on board. •

Declaration: Margaret Simons made a submission to the ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry and was consulted by inquiry staff. Her submission, submissions she authored to previous inquiries and some of her academic publications were cited in the preliminary report. She is also active in a number of associations that lobby on issues concerning the future of public interest journalism.

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Seeming contradictions like these are not new. Technological change has always been uneven, making manufactured products cheaper, for instance, yet leaving many service activities largely unaffected. Increased productivity in the economy as a whole has pushed wages up, making labour-intensive services more expensive.

This divergence is much more marked with AI. Compared to earlier rounds of technological change, we are seeing a combination of incredibly rapid change and near stagnation. The acceleration of computing power has been so fast that a Series 1 Apple watch (itself a museum piece three years after its introduction) can perform calculations as fast as the Cray X-MP, the most powerful supercomputer in the world back in 1982. The amount of digital information generated every hour of every day exceeds all the digital data that was created up to and including the year 2000.

By contrast, many areas of daily life have changed little over the course of a generation. The most technologically advanced item in the average kitchen is the microwave oven, first marketed to households in the 1970s. Air travel reached its peak of speed with the introduction of the Concorde in 1973; it was withdrawn from service in 2003.

Every now and then, some new advance revolutionises a previously stagnant activity. The typical passenger car today is only marginally different from the models of twenty or even fifty years ago. It has smarter electronics and improved safety systems, but the experience of driving and the basic technology of the internal combustion engine are the same. Over the past decade, though, we have seen the arrival of electric cars and then of autonomous vehicles. While the future remains unclear, it seems certain that road transport will change radically over the next twenty years, and even more so over the next fifty.

Not all the new arrivals are beneficent. In 2062: The World that AI Made, Toby Walsh points to the alarming possibilities raised by autonomous weapons, of which armed drones like the Predator represent the first wave. The drone itself contains nothing fundamentally new — it’s a pilotless aircraft, equipped with cameras and missiles, that can fly for hours. The big developments are in the telecommunications systems that allow controllers on the other side of the planet to view the camera output in real time and order the firing of the missiles at any target that they choose.

At present these controllers are human, error-prone but capable of making moral choices in real time. But the development of pattern-recognition technology is such that it is already feasible to replace the human controllers with an automated control system programmed to fire when preset criteria are identified. The point at which moral choices are made, explicitly or otherwise, is in the setting of the criteria and the programming of the control system.

Further off, but by no means inconceivable, are systems whose criteria for targeting (for example, “fire on vehicles containing armed men”) are replaced by higher-level objectives. Such an objective might be “fire when the result will be a net saving of lives” or, more probably, “fire when the result will be a net saving of lives on our side.” In this case, in effect, the machines are being give moral principles and ordered to follow them.

These possibilities are alarming enough that Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, and some of his colleagues organised an open letter calling on the United Nations to ban offensive autonomous weapons. The letter rapidly attracted 2000 signatures and started a process that may ultimately lead to a new international convention. As the history of disarmament proposals has shown, though, the resistance to any restriction on lethal technology is always formidable and usually successful.

The theme of human choice is developed further in Ellen Broad’s Made by Humans, an excellent analysis of the way the magical character of AI hides built-in human biases. Among Broad’s central observations is the fact that the word “algorithm” is being used in a different way, something I hadn’t noticed until she pointed it out.

For the last thousand years or so, an algorithm (derived from the name of an Arab mathematician, al-Khwarizmi) has had a pretty clear meaning — namely, it is a well-defined formal procedure for deriving a verifiable solution to a mathematical problem. The standard example, Euclid’s algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers, goes back to 300 BCE. There are algorithms for sorting lists, for maximising the value of a function, and so on.

As their long history indicates, algorithms can be applied by humans. But humans can only handle algorithmic processes up to a certain scale. The invention of computers made human limits irrelevant; indeed, the mechanical nature of the task made solving algorithms an ideal task for computers. On the other hand, the hope of many early AI researchers that computers would be able to develop and improve their own algorithms has so far proved almost entirely illusory.

Why, then, are we suddenly hearing so much about “AI algorithms”? The answer is that the meaning of the term “algorithm” has changed. A typical example, says Broad, is the use of an “algorithm” to predict the chance that someone convicted of a crime will reoffend, drawing on data about their characteristics and those of the previous crime. The “algorithm” turns out to over-predict reoffending by blacks relative to whites.

Social scientists have been working on problems like these for decades, with varying degrees of success. Until very recently, though, predictive systems of this kind would have been called “models.” The archetypal examples — the first econometric models used in Keynesian macroeconomics in the 1960s, and “global systems” models like that of the Club of Rome in the 1970s — illustrate many of the pitfalls.

A vast body of statistical work has developed around models like these, probing the validity or otherwise of the predictions they yield, and a great many sources of error have been found. Model estimation can go wrong because causal relationships are misspecified (as every budding statistician learns, correlation does not imply causation), because crucial variables are omitted, or because models are “over-fitted” to a limited set of data.

Broad’s book suggests that the developers of AI “algorithms” have made all of these errors anew. Asthmatic patients are classified as being at low risk for pneumonia when in fact their good outcomes on that measure are due to more intensive treatment. Models that are supposed to predict sexual orientation from a photograph work by finding non-causative correlations, such as the angle from which the shot is taken. Designers fail to consider elementary distinctions, such as those between “false positives” and “false negatives.” As with autonomous weapons, moral choices are made in the design and use of computer models. The more these choices are hidden behind a veneer of objectivity, the more likely they are to reinforce existing social structures and inequalities.

The superstitious reverence with which computer “models” were regarded when they first appeared has been replaced by (sometimes excessive) scepticism. Practitioners now understand that models provide a useful way of clarifying our assumptions and deriving their implications, but not a guaranteed path to truth. These lessons will need to be relearned as we deal with AI.

Broad makes a compelling case that AI techniques can obscure human agency but not replace it. Decisions nominally made by AI algorithms inevitably reflect the choices made by their designers. Whether those choices are the result of careful reflection, or of unthinking prejudice, is up to us.

Beyond specific applications of AI, the technological progress it generates will have effects throughout the economy. Unfortunately — as happened during earlier rounds of concern about technology — the discussion has for the most part been reduced to the question, “Will a robot take my job?” Walsh and Broad both point to the simplistic nature of this reasoning.

A more comprehensive assessment of the economic and political implications of AI comes in Tim Dunlop’s The Future of Everything. (Disclosure: I’ve long admired Dunlop’s work, and I wrote an endorsement of this book.) Rather than focusing on AI, Dunlop is reacting to the intertwined effects of technological change and the dominant economic policies of the past few decades, commonly referred to as neoliberalism or, in Australia, economic rationalism.

The key problem is not that jobs will be automated out of existence. In a system dominated by the interests of capital, the real risk is that technological change will further concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the dominant elite often referred to as the 1 per cent. As Dunlop says, radical responses are needed.

The most obvious is a reduction in working hours. This has been one of the central demands of the working class since the nineteenth-century campaign for an eight-hour working day. After a century of steady progress, the trend towards shorter working hours halted, and even to some extent reversed, in the 1970s. The four decades of technological progress since then have produced no significant movement.

This is a striking illustration of the fallacy of technological determinism. Under different political and economic conditions, information and communications technology could already be providing us with the leisured life envisioned by futurists of the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, it has become a tool for keeping us tethered to the office on a 24/7/365 basis.

Closely related is the question of flexible working hours. As Dunlop observes, “flexibility” is an ambiguous term. Advocates of workplace reform praise flexibility, but what they mean is top-down flexibility, the ability of managers to control the lives of workers with as few constraints as possible. Bottom-up flexibility, the ability of workers to control their own lives, is directly opposed to this. To put it in the language of game theory, flexibility is (most of the time) a zero-sum commodity.

More radical ideas include treating data as labour and moving to collective ownership of technology. Some of the most valuable companies in the world today, including Facebook and Alphabet (owner of Google), rely almost entirely on data generated by users of the internet. “We are all working for these tech companies for free by providing our data to them in a way that allows them to hide our contribution while benefiting immensely from it,” writes Dunlop. “It is way past time that we were paid for this hidden labour, potentially using that income to offset reductions in our formal working hours.”

Dunlop suggests that taxes on the profits of tech companies could be used to finance a universal basic income, which would provide everyone with an income sufficient to live on, whether or not they were engaged in paid work.

The collective ownership of technology sounds radical, but it is, in many respects, an extension of that same argument. Increasingly, technology is embodied not in large pieces of equipment, like blast furnaces or car factories, but in information: computer code, data sets and the protocols that integrate the two. As Stewart Brand observed back in 1984, information wants to be free. In the absence of legal restrictions or secrecy, that is, a piece of information can be replicated indefinitely, without interfering with the access of those who already have it. As the cost of communications and storage drops, so does the cost of replicating and transmitting information.

Of course, there are many reasons, such as privacy, why we might want to restrict access to information. But concerns about privacy have been largely disregarded under neoliberal policies. On the other hand, strenuous efforts have been made to protect and extend “intellectual property,” the right to own information and prevent others from using it without permission. These rights, supposedly given as a reward to inventors and creators, almost invariably end up in the hands of corporations.

From this perspective, longstanding demands for workplace democracy and worker control are merging with the critique of intellectual property largely driven by technical professionals. For these workers, the realities of the information age are incompatible with the thinking behind intellectual property. As Dunlop says, worker ownership is “another way of changing how we think about technology… not just a means to a fairer society, but a demand that fundamentally changes how we understand the creation and distribution of work and wealth.”

There’s a lot more in these books, and particularly Dunlop’s, than can be covered in a brief review. Each provides useful correctives to the lazy thinking about job-stealing robots and infallible algorithms that dominates much of our public discussion. And all centre on the same basic point: while technology has its own logic, the way technology is used is a matter of choice.

The key question is: who gets to make those choices? Under current conditions, they will be made by and for a wealthy few. The only way to democratise choice about technology is to make society as a whole more democratic and equal. •

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Recent events in Parliamentalia, which Chan could hardly have anticipated at the time of writing, provided a grotesque illustration of her theme. Amid the voices that dominate the airwaves, striving to shout each other down and cut each other off, how are we to hear the voices of the people they are supposed to represent? For Hugh Martin, head of distribution for the ABC’s regional and local division, this is a question of central importance.

Martin was an early convert to the digital revolution in news media. From the mid nineties, he was convinced of its “phenomenal” potential as a means of promoting audience engagement and gathering stories from regional and remote locations. Before joining the ABC, he had worked as an online editor for the Age and then spent six years setting up the digital arm of APN News and Media in regional New South Wales and Queensland.

With his metropolitan background, he found himself on a steep learning curve, he says, especially in Queensland, where the concentration of population and resources outside the major cities and strong local cultures created different ground rules for communication. “You can’t do business on the phone,” he says. “You have to go and sit with people, talk to them and understand what their concerns are.” In his current role, presiding over the Connecting Communities project, which involves an expansion of ABC regional operations through forty-eight bureaus across the country, he sees the work of communication as very much a two-way process.

“One of the things we need to do is articulate the value of public broadcasting for Australians in the twenty-first century,” he says. “A lot was done to address what it was for the later twentieth century, but the environment has changed.”

When ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie spoke about the lift in regional coverage at a Friends of the ABC dinner last year, she affirmed her commitment to maintaining the role of the national broadcaster as “Australia’s most important cultural institution” and a vital link between past, present and future.

One of the project’s most interesting and genuinely transformative aspects is its rethinking of the temporal frameworks of broadcasting. Places distant from the capital cities also allow for some distance from the tyranny of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, with its insatiable appetite for “breaking news.” Past, present and future are deeply interwoven.

The expansion itself has been implemented with some speed. Since the middle of last year, Martin has been involved in appointing staff to eighty new positions. Sixteen of the larger bureaus now have their own dedicated chief of staff, formerly a role combined with program-making responsibilities. They act as the editorial head of the local office, fielding the range of news coming in, listing stories for the state news desk and serving as representatives of the ABC in their communities.

Where regional stations were once seen as training grounds and stepping stones for journalists and producers, the new staff have been chosen with the expectation that they will make their careers locally. Being there for the long haul makes possible a different approach to news-gathering, drawing on deeper familiarities with a place and its people, tapping into “what lives under the surface of communities.”

This “slow news” experiment is in its early stages, Martin stresses, and the groundwork takes some time to establish. With funds to send journalists to remoter communities whose stories can’t be told on a fly-in-fly-out basis, he found that higher levels of trust were called for. In one case, the mayor of an Aboriginal town was uneasy about the proposal to send a reporter in for a ten-day residence — not surprising from a historical and political point of view, as Martin says.

It’s a question of how the ABC can go about winning trust, convincing community leaders that the aim is not to make invasive raids for news and information but to give voice to people who might not otherwise be heard. That means working through land councils and other peak bodies who might help build trusting relationships. “It struck me as a conversation that had never happened before. We don’t spend time revisiting stories, trying to do more considered and thoughtful coverage.”

But might this lead to some serious ethical dilemmas? Isolated communities can have ugly problems, and journalists are not necessarily the best people to help in a crisis. What may be a chronic and deeply distressing situation for residents may have nothing more than “breaking news” value for national audiences. I pushed Martin on this question. Did he envisage having to make some tricky judgements about what might be in the best interests of the local people and what might be regarded as “in the public interest”?

It’s important to distinguish between what is in the public interest and what is interesting to the public, he responded, citing the model of Back Roads, where reporters are free of the “public interest” imperative dominating news reportage and can adapt their focus to accord with local perspectives and concerns. In some cases, the interests of the community and those of a news organisation converge quite easily, providing that attention can be trained on a situation in a way that may assist in its resolution.

Martin gives the example of a residents’ campaign to keep the police station open in Alpurrurulam, west of Mount Isa. The police presence had reduced problems of violence associated with alcohol abuse in the township, a dry community in which the elders have struggled to make long-term gains in social wellbeing. In video journalist Lucy Murray’s report, the voices of the elders come through, and it is their concerns that frame the narrative. But wider issues are also covered. Alpurrurulam was one of eighteen remote locations where temporary police posts were established as part of the Northern Territory intervention. Plans to shift to a “remote patrol model” make sense in terms of police logistics and resourcing, but the human impact needs to be recognised.

Larger regional towns generate other kinds of controversy that also call for nuanced ethical judgement. Here, Martin is interested in the relationship between councils and residents. “I think local government is potentially a great power for good,” he says. “It is hugely important in people’s lives, but councils don’t always attract the best representatives. Perhaps the ABC can be a conduit for community ideas and questions that may not be getting through to councils.” He is participating in a Melbourne University research project developing the Australian National Development Index, which documents the aspirations Australians have for themselves, their communities and their country. “With all our radio stations across the country, we can be talking about the issues this project wants to cover. It tends to be the loudest voices that get heard, but there are lots of quieter voices that have really important things to say.”

Some of the regional bureaus are experimenting with a “community commissioning” approach to storytelling. “Simply put,” Martin says, “it’s a way of asking the audience what stories they want to see covered, voting for the most popular idea, and then putting a reporter to work alongside the person who proposed it.” A recent suite of stories from the Kimberley illustrates the diversity of ways in which people interest themselves in the places and landscapes they call home. There are tales of a cache of diamonds lost in the outback during the second world war, of the curious migration of boab trees from Madagascar to the Kimberley, and of how planetary movements create the massive tidal influxes in Talbot Bay.

Martin envisages future changes in the ABC’s role not in technological terms but “as a positive influence in Australian social and democratic life.”

“It’s worth a shot,” he reflects, “because so many other things don’t seem to be working. I’ve always tried to take calculated risks with a view to getting something achieved — new types of audience content, new forms, new ways of telling stories. That’s our opportunity.”

Martin’s opportunity may only push at the edges of the massive communications divide that is the subject of Gabrielle Chan’s book, but cultural change happens through a confluence of energy from many directions. “Localism” is an agenda too easily derailed under the steerage of those who occupy Parliamentalia and whose idea of acknowledging the great wide land they govern is to wear it as an emblem on their lapel pins. If the future of the nation can be wrested from their control, who knows what transformative changes might occur? •

The post Voices of the land appeared first on Inside Story.

Rita Panahi is an outspoken right-wing columnist for Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper and a social commentator on Sky News, 3AW and Channel 7’s Sunrise. She has created a strong brand as a conservative provocateur, with some tipping her as heir apparent to Andrew Bolt, her hard-right tabloid colleague. With more than 150,000 followers on Twitter and Facebook, she is fast becoming one of Australia’s most vocal media personalities. She prides herself on “telling it like it is.” Over the years, she and I have had many frank and robust Twitter debates. Her scorched-earth approach to public discourse has infuriated me. There is almost nothing we have agreed on.

Her background could not be more different from mine: born in Arkansas in the United States, where her Iranian father was studying to become an engineer, she moved back to Tehran with her family at the age of three. In 1984, after the revolution that led to the installation of Ayatollah Khomeini’s repressive regime, the family was accepted into Australia as refugees and moved to Melbourne when she was eight years old.

It is her memories of life under the Ayatollah — when she and her schoolmates were made to chant “Death to America” before each class — that helped inform a deep contempt for people who apologise for radical Islam, a topic she writes about with great frequency and fervour. She believes that political correctness is largely to blame for the Western world’s failure to combat Islamic terrorism.

Another passion is her intense displeasure with the latest generation of feminists, who she says obsess about trivial or imagined offences while “ignoring the persecution of their sisters in the name of Islam.” In a column to mark International Women’s Day, she wrote, “It’s clear the feminist movement has been hijacked by the regressive left with a level of hypocrisy and inanity unmatched in public discourse; just when you think these dolts have hit rock bottom, they find shovels and start digging.”

When I hit my own rock bottom — a breakdown that saw me crippled by anxiety and depression, leaving me unable to work for almost five months — I began to realise Rita was one of my red flags. Arguing with her was not productive; it was a unique form of self-harm. I’d see her tweeting about “SJWs” (social justice warriors) and “regressive left-wing flogs” and would be compelled to respond. It felt personal. I’d take to my keyboard and outline how wrong she was, mocking her arguments to the cheers of my followers. I could lose hours locked in combat with this woman I’d never met.

As I furiously tried to make her see reason, my stress levels skyrocketed. Our followers would join in, taking sides, which only added to the sense of gladiatorial theatre. I had to have the last word. I had to land the killer blow. I simply had to be right. Sometimes the exchanges would stay with me for days.

When I took a break from social media to rebuild myself, I could see that in these moments I was not in control. The ship was being steered by the child part of me that was desperate to be applauded by the crowd. The more anxious I became, the more I took to Twitter for reassurance that I had value. Perhaps I was even a bit jealous of Rita’s growing profile, rocketing me all the way back to the popularity contest of high school. Being seen and heard as I took her on would somehow give me autonomy in a situation where I felt powerless. But the anger was toxic. When you pick up a hot coal to throw at your enemy, you’re left only with burnt hands. So often, anger is externalised shame.

When I returned to Twitter, I thought of what Professor James Doty — founder of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education — had said about the benefits of showing compassion for the “other” and trying to focus on commonalities rather than differences. I still disagreed with most of what Rita said, but I could see our shared interests. We are the same age. We both love cats; we have a passion for the Hawthorn Football Club; and we share an enduring romance with the Italian Riviera. She has a wry sense of humour that is similar to mine, and on some issues, including abortion and gay rights, she is quite progressive. She is also a single mother, and I admired her independence.

The more I practised compassion, for myself and others, the less I felt like fighting. I didn’t imagine we would ever be firm friends, but I wondered if I could learn more about the world, and the people who view it differently from me, by getting to know Rita. And maybe I’d discover that, like me, her online persona was being driven by invisible battles.

I approached her on Twitter, and she accepted my invitation to catch up. When the moment came to finally meet, I was apprehensive. What if she didn’t show? What if she wrote about the encounter in one of her columns? I could just imagine the headline: “My Secret Meeting with a Feral Flog from the Loony Left.”

We met at a bar in Southbank, next to the Herald Sun offices, one evening after work, just as the sun was setting behind the Yarra. I was surprised how quickly I felt comfortable in her company. The conversation flowed easily. She is petite and energetic and has a warm, infectious giggle that makes her seem younger than her years.

I felt secure enough to tell her that in an angrier moment during one of our many Twitter battles I had fantasised about the two of us presenting a left vs right political podcast. I even had a working title: Educating Rita. She laughed, but seemed genuinely surprised that I had given so much thought to our online interactions. In her view, they had never been fights. The anger I felt was not an emotion she shared, although it is something people frequently bring up when they encounter her online.

“I’m often surprised when people say, ‘You’re so angry,’ because I’m never angry on Twitter. Maybe it comes off that way because unless you’re using a smiley face people can misread things,” she said. “That anger accusation always comes from the left, who, to be honest, I perceive as angry, and I’m thinking, are you projecting? Or is it just because my tone doesn’t convey the mocking or the sarcasm?”

As we sipped our drinks — pinot grigio for me, port for her — I suggested that people may perceive her as angry because of the language she uses. Among her favoured terms for those with whom she disagrees are “irrelevant bile-filled dolt,” “moronic nutbag,” “self-loathing broken,” and “deranged leftie loon.”

She said I was mistaking mockery for anger. “I just think some people deserve to be mocked. They are ridiculous, and trying to engage them… One, Twitter isn’t the forum for serious discussion, and two, they’re not worthy of that sort of discussion, they’re worthy of being mocked and dismissed. They’ve said something that is insane or absurd and you’re mocking that particular viewpoint.”

Mockery is an effective way to silence critics. In the kneejerk world of Twitter, it’s a weapon used with blunt force. And it can be vicious. Early last year, I found myself in the unfamiliar position of defending a right-wing millennial commentator. I didn’t know much about Daisy Cousens, other than that she was a writer for conservative publications including Quadrant and the Spectator, and seemed to be a self-styled alt-right flamethrower who prided herself on “triggering snowflakes.”

She had recently praised Donald Trump on Q&A, saying the president was like the “weird relative” who comes over once a year at Christmas and occasionally says embarrassing things but “ultimately you forgive him because he is nice and gives you the best presents.” So yeah, she was an easy target for parody. Her crime on this particular evening was to publish a breathless, first-person account in the Spectator of her one and only meeting with the controversial and recently deceased News Corp cartoonist Bill Leak, in a piece that read as part eulogy, part erotic fan fiction. She described “purring with satisfaction” after appearing on Sky News’s The Bolt Report, and praised Leak as a “gentleman, whose handsome face and unstudied smile left me strangely weak.”

I read it open-mouthed and cringing, wondering if it was satire. The late ABC veteran journalist Mark Colvin described it on Twitter as an “astonishingly bad piece of writing.” That was about as polite as it got. Within minutes, Cousens was a national laughing-stock. High-profile figures played to the gallery of their large followings, dredging up everything she’d ever written and eviscerating it word by word. She was ridiculed in cruel and inventive ways, described as “a cyst that had been left out in the sun,” a “thing,” and a “puffed-up nobody.” Her article was ridiculed as a “bug-eyed, slack-jawed piece of teen romance tripe,” “thigh-slappingly, teeth-grindingly awful,” and “Enid Blyton meets 50 Shades of something that should have been burned on a pyre.”

Women on the internet have copped far worse. But there was something about the gleeful, almost tribal way people rounded on Cousens that made me wonder what the hell we’re all doing in these moments. It was Lord of the Flies meets Mean Girls. People went trawling for old pictures of her, critiquing her looks, her youth and her apparently vapid personality. Memes were created, satirical poems written in her honour. Someone dug up a column she’d written for an obscure overseas website in which she claimed to have turned down sex with a famous athlete. A frenzy ensued as a bunch of women — many of them staunch feminists, who themselves have been the target of vicious online trolling — tore apart the piece, joked about who the sports star could be, or declared that the incident simply never happened.

As I watched it unfold I tweeted: “The Daisy Cousens pile-on is one of the harshest pile-ons I’ve seen in a while. It was a weird piece, but mob humiliation is pretty mean.” And so ensued a furious Twitter debate among my followers on whether Cousens should be defended or if in fact she deserved the ridicule because she’d set herself up as a right-wing provocateur and was therefore asking for it. People told me I’d backed the wrong side, implying I was a traitor to the left for not joining in the public shaming. I added, “Eviscerating a young conservative columnist who wrote something a bit silly is not witty or progressive. It’s just bullying. Maybe don’t.” After several hours I went to bed, realising I’d only thrown kerosene on the flames. In the morning, I logged on and it was still going. People were incensed that I didn’t share their fury.

Rita, who is herself a regular target for trolling and abuse, told me she “couldn’t give a fuck” about the flak she cops, and has grown a thick skin. But I wondered if she ever felt a degree of empathy for the people she disagrees with online?

“Sometimes I think they’re genuinely not well,” she said with a laugh. “I’ll think, there is something much greater wrong with you than your opinion on this particular topic, and your reactions aren’t normal. Quite often then you worry about how they’re reacting. You might be thinking this is a hilarious little exchange, but they might actually be in some sort of a shame spiral. You just don’t want to be adding to someone’s pain or discomfort.”

She has, at times, felt guilty for retweeting ridicule or getting involved in a Twitter pile-on. When I told her about my mental-health battles, she was sympathetic and kind. It is not an attitude she extends to everyone. “It’s hard to have sympathy for people who are genuinely unpleasant. Or their persona seems to be. I’m sure if you met them you’d probably get a very different impression from what you see.”

Which brought me to why we were there. I was curious as to how she viewed me. Online, she uses a broad brush to dismiss everyone on the left side of politics as “idiotic.” What did she hope to get out of meeting with this particular idiot?

“I’ve always thought you seemed like someone I’d be very happy to have a drink with or go to a footy game with or whatever. I’ve never seen you as the enemy,” she said. “It’s unhealthy only to have people around you who agree with you because then there’s not much boisterous discussion or diversity of thought. We’re not at war — this is Australia. It’s not like parts of the world where people you disagree with you literally can’t talk to because it ends in gunfire.”

She explained that she differentiates between the “ordinary left” and the “lunatic left,” and went on to describe my place on this complex continuum. “You’re somewhere between ordinary left and social-justice-warrior left. I think lunatic left is where you don’t want to be. Regressive left is very close to it, then you’ve got your social justice warriors and your ordinary left. So you’re in dangerous territory, you’re getting close to the regressives.”

When someone is essentially calling you intellectually backward, it’s hard to keep an open mind to their broader point. But I listened intently and found that despite the slightly obtuse way her points were being delivered, there remained in her views some areas of common ground with my mine. I couldn’t disagree with her belief that the mainstream media is out of touch with the average punter, given Brexit, Trump and Hanson came as a complete shock to almost every journalist who covered them.

Whether it’s coming from the right or the left, when we shut down debate, try to ban voices we don’t like, and label people with opposing views as stupid or inherently bad, we only risk further alienating communities that already feel ignored. “If you actually think that someone is evil then it gives you licence to not only dismiss their opinions but dismiss them as human beings,” Rita said.

This is the heart of the problem in our divided, digital age. When we separate ourselves into opposing camps and condemn the “enemy” as fundamentally bad, we dehumanise the target, making it easier to join the social media pile-on.

Nowhere was this more apparent than when Yassmin Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-born, twenty-six-year-old Australian mechanical engineer, author and ABC radio presenter, found herself front-page news in 2017 after a seven-word Facebook post on Anzac Day, urging people to remember those in Australia’s offshore detention centres who had fled conflict, went viral. Social media, Liberal MPs and the News Corp papers went into overdrive, calling for her to be sacked, punished or deported, in a frenzied orgy of bloodletting that was revolting in its ugliness.

In the following three months, some 90,000 words would be written about Abdel-Magied in the Murdoch press, with the febrile reaction prompting daily death threats, rape threats, and harassment against a young Muslim woman whose greatest crime was to ask that people pause on a day of remembrance for our war dead to reflect on the plight of refugees fleeing war-torn countries. The abuse proved so extreme that she later announced she was moving to London, writing in the Guardian that she had become the most hated Muslim in Australia. In response, conservative commentator Prue MacSween announced on Sydney’s 2GB radio that she was “tempted to run her over.”

Leaving aside the transparent racism and Islamophobia that underlies the whole sorry incident, there is something deeply troubling about the anger running through these public shamings. As Abdel-Magied pointed out, the visceral nature of the fury weakens us all. It’s a raw, naked rage that divides us into warring tribes, constantly scanning the surrounding landscape for someone to blame.

Rita upset some of her fellow conservatives during the Abdel-Magied furore by not calling for her to be sacked. She told me that in a democracy it is fundamentally unhealthy to silence opinions we don’t like. In that regard, I share her concerns at the way some on the left, in a bid to be inclusive and intersectional, have driven a burgeoning “no platform” movement, banning speakers they don’t agree with from university campuses or glossing over the tensions between radical Islam and women’s or LGBTIQ rights. In some Muslim countries, women are being stoned to death for having sex outside of marriage and gay men are thrown from buildings.

Rita’s opinions might make some on the left uncomfortable, but as a woman of colour and a former refugee who has lived under an oppressive Islamic regime, she has a perspective that can’t be ignored just because it doesn’t fit the ideological narrative of those who view themselves as progressive. You don’t have to agree with her to listen.

“I think if you’re a powerful woman and lucky to be living in the Western world then you’ve got an obligation to at least focus some attention on women who are genuinely oppressed and don’t have a way out,” she said. “I find the abandonment of feminists of that group really quite ugly because that’s to me the biggest battlefront for women, instead of obsessing about sexist air-conditioning. I think it’s a responsibility we have, to focus on those women who are voiceless. It could have been me. It affects family members of mine, and it was just luck that I’m not still there.”

Despite what her critics have claimed, Rita is adamant she’s never written anything she doesn’t believe in. This is not part of a brand she has built to feather her nest. Indeed, she is independently wealthy, with an expansive property portfolio, and could have retired at thirty had she chosen to, she told me. She writes on issues she feels passionately about. During our time together I try to get her to open up. I’m looking for those invisible battles — that soft underbelly we all have. She is guarded and doesn’t give much away, but when I ask about her ten-year-old son, it’s clear that this boy — who on Instagram she affectionately dubs #TGC (The Golden Child) — is the centre of her world. His future informs much of her writing.

“As much as I joke about and mock certain things, and certain trends that are occurring, I do worry about him going off to university and being faced with that oppressive campus culture where you’re expected to think a certain way and you don’t have that diversity of thought or critical thinking being celebrated,” she said. “I would hate for him to go off and be exposed to that or be made to feel guilty because he’s male or to be blamed for things he’s not guilty of just because of the sex he was born into.”

After a couple of hours, we had to bring our catch-up to an end. She was heading to the studio to appear on Sky News’s The Bolt Report. As a condition of our interview I had promised to let her see the chapter before publication. “I’m trusting you,” she said, before adding, “I screenshotted the message. The one where you said you’d give me copy approval.”

I didn’t blame her. We were from different worlds. Over a drink we had narrowed the gulf, but the apprehension remained. No doubt I will continue to disagree with Rita on many issues. When she talks about the “broken dullards of the regressive left,” it will still make my teeth itch. And I’m sure my social justice warrior-ing will keep her in eye rolls for years to come. But I’m tired of being angry all the time. I remain a passionate advocate for equality, inclusion and the progressive causes that Rita might view as “SJW virtue signalling.” But I’m no longer convinced that righteous fury is the best vehicle for change.

The anger is corrosive. It diminishes me and my argument. I know it’s not easy to remain calm and dignified when the public rhetoric is so poisonous — especially for those in marginalised communities who face constant attacks on their humanity and are still fighting for basic rights. How do you remain stoic and gracious when you’re being told you’re an abomination? A terrorist? A dole-bludging waste of space? And yet, history consistently shows that the antidote to hate is not more hate. We need dialogue and open hearts. As the American writer Van Jones says, we have to see the dignity and humanity in all people. And at the end of the day, branding someone a moron has rarely changed anyone’s mind.

Meeting Rita won’t heal the world, but it has helped change me. She’s no longer just an avatar behind a series of tweets. I know I won’t find fulfilment in telling her she’s wrong. I can’t imagine ever ridiculing her again to win the admiration of my followers. My happiness levels do not improve by fighting with people on the internet. The anger I once felt when battling with Rita online — an out-of-control fury that would send my anxiety soaring and leave me empty — has dissipated. It’s easy to throw stones at an ideology. It’s much harder to hurl them at flesh and blood. •

This is an extract from Jill Stark’s new book Happy Never After, published this month by Scribe.

The post Love thine enemy appeared first on Inside Story.

An associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton since the 1970s, Morris had become a senior adviser to the president following the Democratic Party’s disastrous showing in the 1994 midterm elections, when the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress. Morris urged Clinton to adopt his “triangulation” or “Third Way” strategies, under which the Democrats would move to the political centre, adopting the best policies of both the left and the right and appearing sensible and pragmatic to the mass of non-ideological voters.

Morris also encouraged Clinton to view voters much as a business would its potential customers. “I felt the most important thing for him to do was to bring to the political system the same consumer-ruled philosophy that the business community has,” he told Adam Curtis in the 2002 documentary The Century of the Self. “I think politics needs to be as responsive to the whims and the desires of the marketplace as business is. And it needs to be as sensitive to the bottom line — profits or votes — as a business is.”

This involved an altered relationship between politicians and voters, in which the techniques of market research became central. Rather than offering a political vision based on deeply held principles, politicians would simply ask the voters what they want and deliver accordingly. “Instead of feeling that you can stay in one place and you can manipulate the voters,” said Morris, “you need to learn what they want and move yourself to accommodate it.”

A sex scandal forced Morris out of the Clinton White House in the lead-up to the 1996 presidential election, after which he began devoting himself to a much grander project: bringing direct democracy to the world via the internet. In 1999, he and his wife launched the website Vote.com and published a book of the same name. The concept was simple: the site would pose questions on contemporary political issues and provide rudimentary summaries of the opposing arguments, and Americans would log on and vote. Vote.com would then email the results to members of Congress as evidence of the popular will.

Though Morris was prescient about the internet’s ever-increasing potential for political campaigners, his Vote.com project demonstrated much of the hubris that defined the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. “As everybody learns to log on,” he wrote, “internet voting will become the centrepiece of our democracy.” Morris’s belief that internet-powered direct democracy would undermine and eventually replace representative democracy proved to be little more than a combination of wishful thinking and shameless self-promotion. He persevered with the website for several years, but it never took hold, and updates ceased in 2013.

Back in Sydney, in May 2000, Morris was the talk of the town. Appearing as a guest of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, he was the subject of considerable coverage in the local press, though the media’s interest in Morris had as much to do with his scandalous past as his vision for the future of democracy. Latham, though, was already a big fan of the “political guru” and his Third Way politics. “Morris is the Machiavelli of our time,” he enthused in the Financial Review in August 1999. “His success as a political consultant in the United States is now matched by his dazzling insights and advice in printed form. He makes the rest of us look like flim-flam on the atlas of public life.”

When the two met for dinner Latham was eager to gobble up any ideas Morris had about the future of Australian politics. Having long bemoaned the state of the Australian political system, “riddled with public distrust, broken promises and phoney expectations,” Latham immediately shared Morris’s optimism about the potential of digital democracy. He was also excited that Morris saw Vote.com as a lucrative commercial venture. “I’m keen to explore the potential in Australia,” Latham wrote in his diary. “Make a few bob and open up the Australian political system along the way. Sounds like paradise.”

Third Way Australia, Latham’s attempt at bringing digital democracy to Australia, launched in April 2001. Considerably less ambitious than Vote.com, it was open only to voters in Latham’s electorate of Werriwa, and would not include important matters of state, such as economic management and foreign policy.

“The decisions best suited to direct democracy involve value judgments,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph on the day of the website’s launch. “They concern the relationship between people in some ethical or moral way. These are the issues on which people feel disenfranchised, where they have strong opinions but never get the chance to comment.” Examples he cited included online gambling, censorship, euthanasia, genetic engineering and human cloning, Aboriginal reconciliation, multiculturalism and the republic.

Latham planned to put a question to his electorate every week. “I will then be obliged to act on the majority view,” he said, “ensuring that the Werriwa decision is advanced within parliamentary debates, the Labor caucus and the media.” The initiative was welcomed by the Daily Telegraph, by Kim Beazley, and even by the Liberal Party’s Peter Reith. But it drew ridicule from Latham’s fellow ambitious backbencher Kevin Rudd, who pointed out a handful of its flaws in a short opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph. “We have just had the dot.com disaster in the economy,” Rudd concluded. “Does Mark now want to deliver a tech-wreck on democracy?”

In any event, in what has since become a recurring experience, Latham failed. He had hoped for at least 1000 participants on each vote, but achieved an average of just 300. “For those who do vote, the results and feedback have been good,” he wrote in his diary in August 2001. “But we have a long way to go before e.democracy takes over from the traditional system. The interest is not there. Dick Morris’s promise of a political revolution has stalled at the gates of the Bastille.”

One of the problems that Latham’s experiment faced was his commitment to the Labor Party, and its requirement that he support the decisions of caucus once policy positions had been debated and resolved. Regardless of what a few hundred of his constituents might have told him to do, he remained bound by the rules of his party. The next significant attempt to bring digital democracy to Australia tried to avoid this problem in an innovative way. Senator On-Line, launched in 2007 as “Australia’s first internet-based democratic political party,” had no platform or policies.

Senator On-Line was the brainchild of Sydney businessperson Berge Der Sarkissian, a man whose background did not augur well for those concerned about the possibility of the electoral system being gamed. In 2002 the Australian Securities and Investments Commission found that Der Sarkissian had engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct in making hundreds of applications for Telstra shares under false names, and banned him from holding a financial services licence for two years. To potential supporters of Senator On-Line, Der Sarkissian simply admitted his mistake and asked for a second chance.

Rather than try to influence politicians already sitting in parliament, Senator On-Line aimed to send its own people to Canberra — people whose explicit directive would be to represent the views of the majority, as expressed through the party’s online polls. Every Australian on the electoral roll would be entitled to a vote on each bill or issue, and Senator On-Line representatives would be contractually obliged to vote in parliament in accordance with the majority view. All of this was announced before the party had even invested in a software package to run the process, but Der Sarkissian remained sanguine. “If we were fortunate enough to get a seat,” he told the Canberra Times, “we would have six months to get it up, which should be plenty given that there are some packages available.”

Senator On-Line aimed to “bring Australian politics directly to the citizens,” but its electoral performances suggest it has done anything but. Having run Senate candidates in every federal election since 2007, its best results came in Tasmania and Queensland in 2010, where it received 0.45 per cent and 0.36 per cent of the vote respectively. But even these results were boosted by the party’s having been placed first on the ballot paper. In ballots where this advantage was absent, Senator On-Line’s vote has never exceeded 0.2 per cent. In 2015 the party changed its name to Online Direct Democracy, but the rebrand did little to improve electoral returns, and with the rise of more Web 2.0–savvy competitors, its prospects look grim.

Senator On-Line’s failings seem to have done little to deter other digital democracy enthusiasts. Max Kaye, a software developer in his mid twenties, began thinking seriously about digital democracy in 2013 after his formative political experiences proved disheartening. He had been involved in protests against staff cuts at the University of Sydney in 2012, but was horrified when socialists and anarchists took the campaign in a much more militant direction than he was comfortable with. The following year he volunteered on the Greens’ federal election campaign in the Hunter Valley. Again he was left unimpressed. “I started to realise that a lot of these organisations really don’t engage deeply with how they want to achieve their goals,” he tells me. “And when their goals seem to conflict with reality in some way, they just ignore reality.”

It was around this time that Kaye met Nathan Spataro. Both were involved in Australia’s bitcoin community, and were excited about the wider potential of blockchain: the technology behind the burgeoning cryptocurrency. Blockchain appeared to solve some of the security and privacy problems that had hampered earlier attempts to advance digital democracy, and in 2015 the pair launched the Neutral Voting Bloc. Described on its website as “a political party for the modern age; like an app, a political app,” the Neutral Voting Bloc’s initial aim was to win one per cent of the national primary vote, which, via a “Senate preference hack” akin to Glenn Druery’s infamous preference whispering, could be translated into six Senate seats. “Will you be part of the 1 per cent to take back democracy?” asked the website, oxymoronically.

In early 2016 the party changed its name to Flux, and a redesigned website set about explaining the concepts behind the project. Unlike earlier iterations of digital democracy, Flux does not adopt a simplistic majoritarian approach to politics, in which the majority view should always prevail. Flux prefers a model called issue-based direct democracy, or IBDD, which, according to Kaye, “comes at the problem of democracy from an entirely novel position: that democracy should be designed around solving problems, not ‘the will of the people.’”

The key innovation is that participants have the ability to trade votes, which Kaye and Spataro describe in their paper “Redesigning Democracy” as “the magic behind IBDD.” The Flux software allows users to trade away votes on issues they don’t care about, in exchange for credits on issues they do. Thus, it is argued, on each issue the best outcomes will be achieved thanks to the specialist contributions of those most engaged.

The desire to empower specialists is fundamental to the Flux vision. “Good policy is informed by policy expertise,” its website declares. “Flux will enable specialists and experts, with the support of the Australian people, to meaningfully impact policy in their fields, in a way they never have before.” Kaye believes that “all evils are due to a lack of knowledge… and that the progress of people (and prosperity linked to that) is essentially unbounded — it’s just a matter of creating the right knowledge.” While this approach raises questions about the potential for self-interested specialists to game the system, Kaye is quick to reject the notion that IBDD would amount to a technocracy, and expects that non-specialists will be just as keen to sign up to Flux.

Flux received plenty of uncritical press attention in the lead-up to the 2016 federal election, but the free publicity did little to help the party in the race for seats. Its best results came in New South Wales and Tasmania, in both of which it received 0.28 per cent of the Senate vote. In the 2017 WA state election Flux polled 0.44 per cent in the upper house, but Kaye takes issue with the view that this was an underwhelming result. Filled with youthful enthusiasm, he remains optimistic about Flux’s prospects in future elections. But with its planned Senate preference hack — rendered moot by the Senate voting reforms passed in March 2016 — and its attempt to game the WA election by running twenty-six independent candidates with the sole purpose of directing preferences to Flux, there are considerable grounds for scepticism about the purity of its democratic vision.

“Delightfully naive” is how Peter Chen describes Flux. A senior lecturer in politics at the University of Sydney, with a special interest in new media’s impact on electoral politics, Chen told Reuters, “They’re obviously guys who are really focused on the tech thing and that has always been the problem with the e-democracy people. They’re often really tech-driven and they need political scientists at the brainstorming floor to say ‘well, I don’t know if that’d work.’” Adam Jacoby went through such a process in the development of MiVote, and believes he has come up with the best model of digital democracy yet.

Jacoby’s background is in the sports industry, where he spent twenty years creating and managing sports travel, media and logistics companies. But after having children, he began to think more deeply about the world they would inherit, and didn’t like what he saw. He felt that democracy was failing to deliver on its promises, and his children were facing a world in which their voices made no difference. “So then I started thinking,” Jacoby says as he sits in MiVote’s spacious Melbourne office, “if you were going to recreate democracy as a product, what does it need to do, how does it need to behave so that it delivers on the promise, it has integrity, people want to keep buying it, people want to tell their friends about it and tell them to buy it — what does it need to be?”

Following a number of conversations with software developers about the possibilities of blockchain, Jacoby became convinced that it was time for a “big strategic intervention” into the democratic process. He was introduced to Richard Hames — “one of the world’s greatest corporate philosophers and strategic futurists,” according to his own website — whose Centre for the Future then agreed to fund the early development of MiVote. Jacoby gathered a team of developers, strategists, researchers and marketers to help create a political movement based on the MiVote smartphone app, which was officially launched in February 2017.

The main distinction between MiVote and Flux is its “destinational” voting model, which aims to break down the left-versus-right binary that dominates democratic politics across the globe. Rather than offering simple yes or no votes based on legislation before the parliament, MiVote follows a convoluted process to come up with four policy destinations on each issue: one from the left, one from the right, one from the centre and one entirely out of left field.

After being provided with an information pack, app users are asked to choose the option that “most accurately represents the direction you would like the policy to head.” They can choose as many as they like, or none at all. Unlike Senator On-Line and Flux, MiVote is not a registered political party and will not contest elections. Instead, it will offer its software to candidates for office who pledge to uphold MiVote’s constitution.

“Democracy without the politics” was Jacoby’s preposterous claim at the time of MiVote’s launch. The desire to move beyond ideology is a characteristic of many digital democracy start-ups, but is most pronounced in MiVote. “We’re trying, as much as is humanly possible, to reinforce that this is a place of objectivity,” says Jacoby. “Although we may as individuals have ideological beliefs, they don’t play a part in the way that politics should work. There needs to be a place where you can just get information and have your say.”

Jacoby wants to eradicate the inherently messy, ugly battles over ideas and interests that are the inevitable product of democratic politics. Like Dick Morris before him, he believes that politicians should simply ask what their constituents would like them to do, and then act according to the informed majority view. Essentially, Jacoby sees democracy as a marketplace, and more than anything else, he is a salesman. His well-rehearsed monologues about “re-architecting” democracy come across as an unconvincing combination of naive idealism and commercially driven bombast.

The technocratic urge to rid democratic politics of its inherent messiness is not new, and is especially strong in the United States. Probably the most infamous example of a technocrat in power is Robert McNamara, president John F. Kennedy’s surprise appointment as secretary of defense in 1961. Armed with an MBA from Harvard, McNamara had been part of a team of air force veterans who used modern research, planning and management techniques to turn the Ford Motor Company around in the 1940s and 1950s. As Michael Boyle wrote upon McNamara’s death, he “believed that the methods of the behavioural sciences could be applied to government decision-making, to rationalise its operation and minimise the chances for error, and to create a government that was ruthlessly efficient.” The horrific reality of this approach was the slaughter and destruction of the Vietnam war.

More commonly, there is a tendency to turn to technocrats in times of political or economic crisis. A fully fledged “technocracy movement” came to national attention in the United States during the Great Depression, but interest quickly subsided. The modern preference for central bank independence — whereby unelected economists and bureaucrats are free to determine monetary policy without political interference — took hold in response to the inflation crises of the 1970s. In November 2011, at the height of the eurozone debt crisis, economists from outside politics were appointed as emergency prime ministers of both Greece and Italy, tasked with rising above the partisan bickering and steadying their respective economies. All of these examples share with digital democrats a scepticism about representative democracy’s ability to meaningfully confront the most difficult and divisive issues.

British political theorist Bernard Crick argued in his 1962 classic In Defence of Politics that technology had become perverted into a social doctrine: “‘Technology’ holds that all the important problems facing human civilization are technical, and that therefore they are all soluble on the basis of existing knowledge or readily attainable knowledge — if sufficient resources are made available.” Crick’s words are especially apposite in our present age of technological disruption, in which “like Uber, but for politics” is not just a sardonic joke but an accurate insight into the intellectual depth of some digital democracy evangelists.

The Scanlon Foundation’s 2017 Mapping Social Cohesion survey found high levels of dissatisfaction with Australian democracy, with 30 per cent of respondents in favour of major change to our system of government. Many voters appear to be in search of political certainty, and digital democrats believe they can deliver it. But as Crick warned, “the passionate quest for certainty in matters which are essentially political” is one of the great enemies of politics. “The quest for certainty scorns the political virtues — of prudence, of conciliation, of compromise, of variety, of adaptability, of liveliness — in favour of some pseudo-science of government, some absolute-sounding ethic.” ●

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Reminding us that the media is still a place where very different commercial, civic, political and cultural worlds coexist and sometimes collide, the understandings and expectations of key players and observers vary dramatically. Where Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood sees a merger, the Australian sees the death of Fairfax. Journalists and academics see a new challenge to diversity and democracy. Paul Keating sees Nine’s toxic tabloid culture metastasising, while the government tells a story about ensuring the long-term health of Australian media businesses. So far the stock market hasn’t shared the government’s confidence, with Nine shares falling since the deal was announced, reducing the value of the offer.

In recent days these differences over the significance and implications of this moment of change have taken a sharper form. When the deal was announced, the prime minister welcomed the news. He acknowledged that the agreement required the approval of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, but said that the parties expected “no regulatory hurdles.” Market analysts have generally signalled that they expect no major obstacles.

It’s true that the ACCC has a record of approving recent media mergers. But was there an echo in the PM’s remarks of his famous declaration last year that “the High Court will so hold,” with an equal potential for trouble? The media law changes were necessary for the formulation of this merger, but they are not sufficient to guarantee its success. Rod Sims, chairman of the ACCC, has now laid out the regulatory process in plain terms, talking about a vigorous, twelve-week review with the scope to be much more than perfunctory acquiescence. “Of course the merger parties say there are no competition issues. They always do. Every merger I have ever come across, the merger parties said ‘why do you bother us, there are just no competition issues,’” he was reported as saying.

Sims, who is about to enter his last year heading the ACCC, talked about the issues likely to arise for the commission, and signalled some interesting questions, none of which have been addressed by the government, or by the proponents of the deal. The ACCC’s job will be to determine whether the Fairfax acquisition will substantially reduce competition in media markets: on the face of it, a dry exercise in technocratic calculation.

But competition in media industries also raises public-interest issues of diversity, localism and quality that have not been squarely addressed by the government or the two companies. Media businesses often deal not just with one market for their work but with at least two, because both advertisers and viewers are, in different ways, consumers of their products.

So the ACCC must gauge the effects of the acquisition on viewers, advertisers and possibly content providers as well. It will look particularly at where the activities of Fairfax and Nine overlap — those areas, especially news, local information and advertising, where competition might be reduced by the takeover. It can look at evidence not only about the national market but also in relation to specific local and regional markets.

Nine has already raised the question of whether regional media will have a place in the new conglomerate. In Newcastle, for example, the network controls the local NBN TV station and Fairfax owns the Newcastle Herald. Here, measures of competition turn out to be closely linked to questions of concentration and diversity. If competition lessens, the reductions in service that follow may well mean losing different voices. For the same reason, the quality of media services will also be an important consideration.

The market for advertising has been dramatically transformed and expanded by the emergence of Google, Facebook and mobile media, but journalism is another story. The point is often made that readers and viewers now have ready access to more sources of news than ever, but fewer journalists are generating local news. Online-only publications, such as BuzzFeed and Guardian Australia, are important new sources, but they don’t aim to provide the detailed city-based coverage we find in Fairfax’s metropolitan mastheads, and they certainly don’t offer consistent regional reporting.

One organisation that does provide a journalistic alternative, and does cover regional Australia to the degree its reduced budget allows, is the ABC. The ACCC could find that the ABC’s coverage provides an ongoing alternative to Nine/Fairfax news. If that was then a reason for the ACCC not to oppose the merger, Australia’s public broadcaster could find itself underwriting the government’s objectives in the commercial media sector. The position is complicated by the fact that the minister, at the request of One Nation, is conducting his own ad hoc review of the competitive impacts of the ABC, responding to the claims of companies including Fairfax that its online presence undermines commercial media.

The interactions between Mitch Fifield’s inquiry, now due to report, and that of the ACCC will be interesting. The virtue of the ACCC review will be its public process, grounded in well-established institutional, legal and regulatory conventions. These provide some much-needed protection, real and perceived, from immediate political and business imperatives. The ACCC’s processes allow for the consideration of viewers’ and readers’ interests. Like all regulators and policy-makers in this area, though, it faces the difficulty of predicting outcomes in an industry where digital disruption has moved faster and further than in almost any other area, and where the investment in automation and artificial intelligence is intense. Blockchain and other emerging technologies are likely to bring about further changes in journalism and advertising.

Just as we are now making decisions about what we call “legacy” media businesses on the basis of old policy arguments, so our knowledge of the sector is also struggling to answer questions about how we gauge the volume and significance of local, regional or national content on internet platforms. The current moment is demanding bold assumptions from regulators, industry and policy-makers. ●

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It started on Monday, when #MyHealthRecord trended all day on Twitter and was still sitting at number two the next morning. It was there for all the wrong reasons, from the point of view of the Australian Digital Health Agency and advocates of the new system. The source of the controversy was the decision, flagged in last year’s federal budget, to shift My Health Record from an opt-in to an opt-out system.

Australians have until 15 October to go through the opting-out process if they don’t want a My Health Record created for themselves or dependent children, and last Monday was day one of the opt-out period. It didn’t go smoothly, with much of the commentary on Twitter citing privacy and security concerns about the use, and possible misuse, of health data.

After the online opt-out process and associated call centre were reportedly overwhelmed by the volume of traffic and several prominent commentators went public with their concerns in the Fairfax press, health minister Greg Hunt was forced to defend what the government planned to do with consumers’ health data, including the fact that it would not be shared with Centrelink.

In the Conversation, IT legal experts made the case for opting out in the morning, and health policy expert Jim Gillespie made the case for opting in in the afternoon. Hunt, and senior figures from the Australian Digital Health Agency, worked hard all day to steer the message back to the benefits of participation, including in a lengthy interview on the ABC’s RN Drive with Steve Hambleton, a doctor who is also deputy chair of the My Health Record expansion program. Hambleton sought to allay concerns and pointed to the positive experiences of the six million users already participating.

Some of the strongest supporters of My Health Record are those working in the rural health and Indigenous health sectors — with good reason. The National Rural Health Alliance has released a statement urging rural Australians to stay in, and both Mark Diamond, from the Alliance, and John Paterson from the Aboriginal Medical Services Alliance Northern Territory spoke passionately on the ABC’s RN Breakfast about the benefits for patients of accurate records that can be accessed wherever they are.

A multi-organisation communique published on Tuesday by the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation provided a useful round-up of the strength of support for My Health Record and the decision to move to an opt-out model. It cited support from the Australian Medical Association, the Consumers Health Forum, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, the Pharmacy Guild, and the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association, among others.

In an article last month for the health policy website Croakey, Leanne Wells, the CEO of the Consumers Health Forum, had carefully examined the pros, cons, risks and challenges of My Health Record. Although the Consumers Health Forum expressed its support for a modernised digital records system with high consumer and practitioner participation, Wells’s Croakey post included a warning that would prove prescient given the rocky start to the opt-out period. She writes:

It is also important for the federal government to be acutely mindful of how fickle community trust and confidence in a system such as My Health Record can be: trust can be slow to build, but quick to erode. Communication about benefits and the assurance about safeguards have to go beyond what is required or even expected to ensure trust is not maintained, but built, as various consumer sentiment barometers tell us that trust in institutions generally is at a low ebb.

Further evidence of the complexity faced by some patients in making the decision whether to participate in My Health Record comes from Scarlet Alliance, the Australian Sex Workers Association, which has produced an information sheet that goes a long way to explaining — for all potential opters in and opters out — how My Health Record works and how all health consumers can take steps to improve their health information privacy.

Last week’s day from hell for My Health Record shows the size of the challenge of building the trust needed to realise the long-held dream of secure, readily accessible, accurate, appropriately used and empowering health records for Australians.

As the controversy swirled on Twitter, Croakey asked Dr Trent Yarwood, an infectious diseases physician and a member of digital advocacy group Future Wise, to explain his disquiet about My Health Record. Yarwood is one of the few commentators who bring both a medical and an IT perspective to the debate, and many doctors will relate to his concerns about how medical information, provided for patient care, could be used in other contexts; his observations are reproduced below.

The controversy hasn’t abated over the intervening week. It was reported that 20,000 people navigated the technical hitches and waiting times to opt out on the first day of the three-month period, but no update on numbers has been provided since, despite the ABC asking the question. Concerns about unauthorised access (by hackers) and authorised access (by non-health government bodies or third parties authorised by the Digital Health Agency) remain prominent in the debate.

Much of the commentary repeats and extends Trent Yarwood’s concerns. Participants in the debate have included heavyweights like human rights commissioner Edward Santow, who told ABC Radio’s Sabra Lane that “we can do better” in protecting human rights for digital health record users. Santow stressed the need to give people control over how their information is used, build strong protections against cyber attacks and misuse, and instil confidence that the information will be used only to improve individual users’ health (as opposed to less personally helpful secondary uses).

Former federal AMA president Kerryn Phelps weighed in with an opinion piece in the Brisbane Courier Mail. She had been involved in preliminary discussions about electronic personal health records, she said, but she believed that the legislation allowing access to agencies other than health professionals would potentially breach the “absolute trust” between clinicians and patients.

With the federal opposition maintaining its support for My Health Record while calling for a renewed communications strategy and an extension of the opt-out period, and with one Liberal MP, Tim Wilson, publicly exercising his right to opt out on the grounds that such systems should be opt-in, it doesn’t look like the controversy will end any time soon.

The Digital Health Agency has tried to reassure the public that its policy is not to share data without a “court, coronial or similar order.” It has also been reported that the Digital Health Agency recently tightened its relationships with third party app providers such as Telstra, HealthEngine, Tyde and Healthi, allowing for rapid termination for breaches that threaten the public interest.

Newly appointed AMA president Tony Bartone seemed like a voice in the wilderness as he repeated the simple message that “the electronic record can save lives” in an article published in the Sydney Morning Herald a week into what looks like being a period of ongoing controversy. The records will connect care across the country and the system, improve management for patients with invisible but serious conditions, optimise communication between GPs and hospitals, and reduce polypharmacy, duplication of services and waste. They are all good reasons to stay in, but is the crisis of trust stopping health consumers from paying attention? ●

An earlier version of this article, together with the article below, appeared last week in Croakey, where Ruth Armstrong is an editor.

Why would a doctor not be in favour of My Health Record?

Trent Yarwood, an infectious diseases physician and a member of digital advocacy group Future Wise, outlines his concerns about the scheme

The opt-out period prior to the creation of My Health Records for all Australians began on Monday 16 July. In news that surprised nobody who follows Australian government IT projects (not limited to ATO failures at tax time and the 2016 online #censusfail), both the website and the phone number for people to opt out buckled under the strain.

Despite support from doctors’ groups, including the Australian Medical Association and the National Rural Health Alliance, I am very firmly on the record as thinking it’s a bad idea.

Correcting misconceptions: My Health Record isn’t a comprehensive medical record, and nor is it a replacement for your GP’s records or your hospital file. Both of these will still exist. But My Health Record is designed to make it easier to bridge the gap between the two; your healthcare providers will be able to upload summary information that can then be accessed by other providers.

It will also, by default, include your Medicare-rebated health services history (for example, on 16 July you saw GP with provider number 1234567X for a standard consultation) and your Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme dispensing history (on 16 July you were dispensed some amoxicillin), as well as your pathology and other investigation results.

At the hospital end, your discharge summary and clinic letters can also be uploaded to make it easier for your GP to access them. Poor hospital–primary care communication has been a frequent complaint on both sides.

Benefits: Improving communication between healthcare providers can only be a good thing, as can doing away with the archaic medical custom of transmitting information via fax machine. For patients with complex care needs, and multiple treating clinicians, it’s easy to see benefits from this sort of shared summary.

But many of the purported benefits of the My Health Record seem — to my mind, at least — to be over-egged. “It will provide critical information if you’re unable to provide a history in the event of an emergency,” is usually the first mentioned of these.

Patients who are unable to give any history are not very common in hospitals; those presenting without significant others and with zero capacity are rarer still. In many cases, if someone is completely unconscious, they may well be an Unknown Patient, and it’s a bit hard to look up a shared record for someone you can’t identify.

The second-most common benefit I hear is “it will reduce your need to repeat your history multiple times,” which is by far the least true of them all. No doctors worth their stethoscopes would omit taking a history themselves just because it’s written down. It may guide their questioning, but confirming for themselves is always a good idea — clinically and medico-legally.

In any event, different staff may emphasise different parts of the history, which often necessitates another go round. And, as any junior doctor can attest, the history often changes on the retelling.

So if the benefits seem to be less than advertised, how does this affect the risk–benefit analysis?

Risks: The first — and to my mind the most important — risk with My Health Record is that the risks themselves are very poorly understood.

The Australian Digital Health Agency notes in its digital health strategy that Australians place a high value on the privacy of their health information; “safe” and “secure” are two-thirds of its catchy tagline. But, by design, the primary reason for the existence of shared health records — sharing health information — increases the risk. Improving access to your health data increases the potential for malicious as well as beneficial access.

The biggest threat to health privacy is not the hoodied “hacker” so beloved of media IT stories, but improper access by an authorised user — such as the sale of Medicare numbers reported recently by the Guardian, for example, or when healthcare staff “snoop” on high-profile patients or spouses dig for dirt as part of an unpleasant separation.

Logged access, and sanctions for improper access, do not prevent your loss of privacy, but merely act as a deterrent; and that doesn’t help you when your private medical history is known to another. Confidentiality is a one-way door.

It is certainly true that paper charts don’t have an access log; but it is equally true that you don’t need to have a patient’s history in your hand to digitally access it improperly.

Healthcare workers — primarily GPs — are being made the gatekeepers of My Health Record; it’s their job to discuss with patients the benefits and risks of uploading data to My Health Record. But just as we would ideally like our consent for surgery to be taken by someone familiar with the risks, should we be asking our doctors how familiar they are with cybersecurity?

Healthcare workers are not known for a high degree of technical knowledge; the response from doctors to the recent HealthEngine controversy, in which patient information was shared with lawyers and others (apparently within the terms of service), suggests that there was little understanding of the privacy impact of the popular appointment booking service.

Does your GP have his or her password on a sticky-note on his or her monitor? And what about the rest of the practice software in your doctor’s surgery?

If the My Health Record data are downloaded to the practice computers, then the security measures on the primary record become irrelevant, and your privacy depends on how well your healthcare providers maintain their computers.

Dilemmas for clinicians: My greatest concern as a clinician is that the My Health Records Act includes authority for the Australian Digital Health Agency to disclose information for law enforcement purposes, including (under section 70(1)):

(a) the prevention, detection, investigation, prosecution or punishment of criminal offences, breaches of a law imposing a penalty or sanction or breaches of a prescribed law;

(b) the enforcement of laws relating to the confiscation of the proceeds of crime;

(c) the protection of the public revenue;

(d) the prevention, detection, investigation or remedying of seriously improper conduct or prescribed conduct;

(e) the preparation for, or conduct of, proceedings before any court or tribunal, or implementation of the orders of a court or tribunal.

These broad criteria give a wide range of bodies access to My Health Record data, without there necessarily being a requirement for a warrant — and unlike the primary records held by your healthcare staff, the Digital Health Agency doesn’t need to notify clinicians (or patients) that their records have been accessed.

If as a healthcare worker you are seeing a patient involved in illicit activity (for example, injecting drugs), will you upload a summary in the name of improving their shared healthcare? Or will you respect the secrets confided in you?

I know which I’ll be doing, and I don’t think a system that forces that sort of choice onto clinicians is one that has much to recommend it. ●

Trent Yarwood is an infectious diseases physician and a member of digital advocacy group Future Wise, which focuses on technology, health and education, with an emphasis on digital privacy. The opinions in this article are expressed in his personal capacity, and don’t represent the views of his employers.

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Though no one can remember what the letters actually stand for, KPMG is as instantly recognisable as KFC or KGB. The strangely crenellated acronym PwC might stand for “Pricks with Calculators,” according to its unkind critics, but it is recognised by millions. Deloitte sounds pleasingly French and aristocratic — though the firm’s founder was neither — and for some unknown reason its current logo finishes with a green dot. Ernst & Young — a name that makes the company sound youthful and intense — is now just EY. (Luckily no one in brand management lobbied successfully for a green exclamation mark.)

What the Big Four don’t like is being caught in the act. As the founder of modern accountancy and history’s first great money manager, Giovanni de’ Medici, advised on his deathbed: “Be careful not to attract public attention.” But the Awesome Foursome — which make billions and employ millions — have been filling column inches since the 2008 financial crash with stories of self-inflicted foot wounds. Giovanni would be appalled.

Besides making last year’s Oscars ceremony a global laughing stock, PwC has been having a particularly torrid time. Just this month a US federal judge ordered it to pay over A$850 million in damages to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for failing to pick up the criminal fraud that led to Colonial Bank going belly-up during the 2008 financial crisis.

KPMG is under investigation by Britain’s Financial Reporting Council over its auditing job for drinks company Conviviality, which went into administration soon after it discovered a A$53 million tax bill it hadn’t been expecting. Ernst & Young was the auditor for Lehman Brothers right up until the moment the venerable old firm slipped beneath the waves with the band still playing on deck. Deloitte audited Bear Stearns until it also became an ex-bank.

And now, in Britain, all the members of the famous quartet have been hauled over the coals for their role in the collapse of the construction group Carillion, which is set to cost the British government A$264 million.

Should we be surprised that British MPs have called recently for the Big Four to be broken up, with auditing going one way, advisory services going the other, and ne’er the twain meeting again? And if the regulators don’t get them, might not new technology disrupt them into oblivion?

In this fascinating and thoroughly researched book, Ian Gow and Stuart Kells tell the story of accountancy’s rise and imminent fall. Though they’re experts in finance, the two authors bring a pleasingly anthropological eye to the subject. The Big Four, they inform us, have become “part of the furniture of modern capitalism,” but by the end of their analysis it’s clear that a massive garage sale might be just around the corner.

According to Gow and Kells, the Medicis wrote the original textbook for the profession. Besides counselling discretion, this clan of Renaissance Mafiosi advocated these Golden Rules about the Getting and Keeping of Gold: maintain a close eye on your double-entry bookkeeping; establish a “partner track” to keep everyone loyal and working hard; buddy up to the richest people you can find (popes in the Medicis’ day, big business and governments today); never worry about having a conflict of interest; and lastly, keep very, very quiet about where all the florins are tucked away.

What the Medici family inaugurated, the Big Four perfected; minus, perhaps, the murders. Just like those ruthless Florentines, PwC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG have deployed their expertise in the dark arts of financial legerdemain for fun and profit.

The Big Four is at its best when it’s exposing accountancy’s hidden wild side. In the 1920s, Nicholas Waterhouse — scion of the famous accounting family — might have been a mild-mannered philatelist by day, but at night he threw parties in his Chelsea mansion that were dusted lightly in cocaine and reportedly climaxed in “scenes of open debauch.”

The book’s pre-eminent theme — the drumbeat that holds it all together — is the degradation of the profession over the last several decades. How long can you do time-consuming, low-margin auditing for the same companies that you are doing highly profitable advisory work for, and not be overcome by a conflict of interest? But as that proud muckraker Sinclair Upton once said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The Medicis eventually failed. Bad decisions, undetected frauds, forces beyond their control (mainly in the form of an invasion of Italy by Charles VIII of France), the desertion of allies — all combined to end their run of great and good fortune. The Big Four, argue Gow and Kells, are facing a similar moment of truth. The forces of disruption are coming for the accountants in the same way they came for the journalists, the travel agents and the purveyors of pornographic magazines.

Artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data will soon, they say, bring forth a world in which “audit bots” crawl all over the accounts and report back in real time — replacing those pesky (and pricey) new graduates. Gow and Kells report that EY, for example, has predicted a possible halving of its junior auditor intake by 2020. And the venerable partners can’t be far behind. “Will accountancy become just a sub-branch if IT?” they ask rhetorically. A thousand Chinese start-ups will bloom. The partner track will run into the sand. The once mighty “thud factor” of thousand-page, million-dollar consultancy reports will no longer be heard in the land.

As the famous dictum — paraphrased from George Bernard Shaw — has it, “All professions are a conspiracy against the laity.” And then, one day, a French king turns up at the city gates, the Pope won’t return your messengers any more, and the laity discover that your services are no longer essential. ●

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“Privacy” has become an umbrella term for this idea in some quarters, in the sense of describing the “rules and norms [governing] personal information,” tethered to notions of “trust, obscurity, and autonomy,” as Woodrow Hartzog puts it in his fine new book, Privacy’s Blueprint. I might have reservations about the vocabulary: as the New Yorker’s Louis Menand wrote recently, for many the word “privacy” still signifies that “it’s nobody’s business,” and we may need a better language to talk about “the freedom to choose what to do with your body, or who can see your personal information or who can monitor your movements and record your calls.” Even so, I can’t help but be impressed by Hartzog’s central argument: that we should stop thinking of machines as inevitable threats to privacy (and, I’d add, to identity more generally) and start thinking about their capacity to enhance our freedom. The trick is good design, and it is here that legal policy-makers should focus more attention.

In Western democracies we have become inured to the idea that new technologies will enhance some freedoms while inhibiting others, and accustomed to seeing the law pulled in to even up the balance when social norms and markets fail. The roots of this approach go back a long way. The printing press might have enabled newspapers, magazines, books, pamphlets and other literature to proliferate in the centuries after its invention — contributing to what Jürgen Habermas calls the “public sphere” — but it also gave control of the dissemination of knowledge to individual printers and publishers, provoking battles over the control of personal information.

When the Grub Street press published revealing letters, stories of clandestine encounters and outrageous biographical claims for its eager audiences, calls for legal intervention inevitably followed. Legislators and judges crafted (or extended) a range of responses, including statutory copyright, a common law property right in unpublished works, and defamation law. By the early nineteenth century, one of the new measures — the equitable action for breach of confidence — was already being thought of as a means for protecting personal secrets from unwanted publicity.

Soon, these legal protections were expanded to deal with new visual technologies such as engraving and etching, which were especially popular in the Victorian era. In that era’s leading privacy case, Prince Albert v Strange, both the property right in unpublished works and breach of confidence were relied on to stop publication of an unauthorised exhibition and accompanying catalogue of domestic etchings made by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert that had been obtained by the defendant, William Strange, using “surreptitious and improper” means. In this case, Lord Cottenham LC expressly referred to “the right [to] privacy” as “the right invaded.”

But it was the remarkable rise of photography from the mid nineteenth century, expanding the possibilities for precisely recording intimate visual displays, that had the most tangible effect on modern thinking about the law and privacy (and identity more broadly). “Instantaneous photographs” — no doubt a reference to George Eastman’s popular portable, easy-to-use camera, invented in the 1880s — along with “newspaper enterprise” and the public’s taste for “gossip,” prompted Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis to argue in 1890 that “the right to privacy,” a right to be “let alone” as they termed it, required an urgent legal response. Many of the reforms to privacy law during the twentieth century can be traced back to that rallying call.

Nevertheless, as Hartzog observes, the situation seems to have become unbalanced by the apparently open design of the internet and related technologies in the late twentieth century moving in to the current century. He is not the first one to make this observation. In 1999, in Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Harvard Law School’s Lawrence Lessig identified the internet’s powerful open architecture as a design feature with radical consequences for those seeking to control the circulation of personal information, including through traditional copyright, defamation and privacy laws. In 2010, Cornell Tech’s Helen Nissenbaum argued in Privacy in Context that technologies of “pervasive surveillance, massive databases, and lightning-speed distribution of information across the globe” pose serious threats to privacy. And George Washington University Law School’s Daniel Solove has repeatedly demonstrated how the massive sharing of personal information permitted by the online environment is only partly and inadequately ameliorated by the law.

What is interesting, however, about Hartzog’s work is his focus on what he calls “abusive design.” He focuses on the confusing, manipulative and generally untrustworthy forms of conduct that have grown up around institutional dealings with personal information, aided by current and emerging technologies. In the past, legal attempts have been made to deal with the most egregious problems of untrustworthy conduct, but these actions have typically been launched after the event and have relied on updated versions of the traditional doctrines, supplemented by twentieth-century legal innovations such as consumer protection, data protection standards and a general-purpose tort of negligence crafted and refined in response to the exigencies of the postwar and especially post-computer era. The question is whether these laws and doctrines can still work in the twenty-first century.

As Hartzog points out, some positive signs can be found in the US Federal Trade Commission investigations of the practices of Facebook, Google and other companies, relying on section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which proscribes unfair or deceptive practices in trade. Further, Data Protection Commission inquiries in Britain and Europe have relied on data protection laws that may have suddenly become much stronger with the implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, in May this year. Cases launched by individuals and through class actions — including Vidal-Hall v Google in Britain, Fraley v Facebook in the United States and Jane Doe v Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Australia (all eventually settled) — have also served to reinforce the idea that older laws and doctrines geared to controlling unwanted publicity, careless behaviour and deceptive practices may still be useful in the digital age.

And so it goes on: revelations of Sony’s alleged negligence in failing to protect employees against hacking of its system in 2014 (possibly in protest at its planned release of The Interview, a film mocking the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un); the spectacular compromising of the dating website Ashley Madison’s advertised promise of secrecy for its members, by a 2015 hack; and now the Cambridge Analytica debacle. All of them have added to questions about whether individuals can withstand covert manipulation even in voting decisions, and prompted further official inquiries and further class actions. But the fact remains that the new communications technologies of the 1990s and 2000s have exacerbated the tensions between fostering free, transparent information and debate, on the one hand, and maintaining space for individuals to control “their” personal information, on the other. And along the way they have also worked to undermine trust.

So what is Hartzog’s answer to this problem? As a professor of computer science as well as law at Northeastern University, he is refreshingly concerned with how technologies work as well as with their effectiveness in communicating their functions to users. As he puts it, “people should design objects that have visible clues as to how they work.” Here he makes excellent use of the wonderful insights of design researcher Donald Norman, who helped to pioneer the idea of human-centred design in the 1990s and continues to write on the topic — and particularly Norman’s argument that “well-designed objects are easy to interpret and understand” in contrast to “poorly designed objects” which can be “difficult and frustrating to use. They provide no clues — or sometimes false clues. They trap the user and thwart the normal process of interpretation and understanding.”

Moreover, as a lawyer, Hartzog is also thinking about the interactions of design and law and the prospect of creating a “design agenda for privacy law.” The language suggests that his focus will be on what former Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian has labelled “privacy by design.” This idea — which is becoming popular in privacy, consumer protection and data protection circles (and is now explicitly enshrined in the GDPR) — that law should foster privacy by design by placing obligations on those responsible for technologies is an example, I would suggest, of human-centred design, given the large numbers of people who claim they want more privacy and data protection than they currently receive.

Not surprisingly, Hartzog adopt a very expansive idea of what privacy by design might amount to in practice. He notes that all kinds of technological design, from “privacy settings” to cookies, can promote or inhibit the ability of users to control how their information is collected, stored and used. Technologies can also communicate their functions in more or less open and transparent ways. He argues convincingly that law-makers could do more to take account of these features, working across “a spectrum of soft, moderate and robust responses” to achieve their regulatory goals. And he generously acknowledges that regulatory agencies such as the US Federal Trade Commission are already adopting strategic approaches to regulating technology companies, for instance by encouraging them to develop technological solutions and trying to ensure that they “are being honest with people.”

Arguably, the same might be said of the GDPR’s provisions for “data protection by design,” notice and consent, and the “right to be forgotten,” which (to an extent at least) also encourage those in control of the technology to elaborate their regulatory standards. And, even before the GDPR, we have the example of Google’s development of a technological system to deal with de-indexing requests prompted by the European Court of Justice’s “right to be forgotten” decision in Google v AEPD and Costeja González, which ruled that “inadequate, irrelevant or excessive” data could be subject to de-indexing on application of the data subject. Nevertheless, as Hartzog illustrates compellingly with numerous examples of absent, inadequate or failed efforts at regulation, there is still great scope for improvement.

Australia has much to learn from this richly informative and insightful book. Our regulatory agencies could benefit from paying close attention to Hartzog’s arguments for more creative, strategic approaches to the challenge of regulating to achieve socially desirable outcomes in the current technological environment, and from reading about the experiments that are already taking place in other jurisdictions. These include the work of the US Federal Trade Commission under a provision that is not so very different from section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law, proscribing misleading or deceptive conduct in trade: a provision that in other contexts has become a staple technique for ensuring that minimum levels of transparency and trust are maintained.

Indeed, given the central problem Hartzog is describing, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission should arguably be taking a more central role in regulating markets that are concerned with the exchange of personal data for goods or services. Perhaps if Australians ever do get the consumer data rights the government has promised in response to the Productivity Commission’s recommendations in its recent data availability and use report, we will see the ACCC taking a more active role. Then we would not have to depend so much on a Privacy Commission armed with a rather limited and qualified Privacy Act to do most of the work of a data protection authority.

But we shouldn’t forget the traditional role of the common law in regulating markets for personal data, and the instrumentality of individuals and groups in pursuing their own protection, including via the rapidly growing technique of the class action. Privacy scholars in Australia (myself included) have spent a lot of time agonising over whether we should have a statutory privacy tort. But, as Hartzog points out, old-fashioned values such as being truthful, taking due care, and generally acting in ways that inspire trust and confidence are still important in dealings with personal information in the current technological environment. Our traditional doctrines may still have much life in the hands of determined individuals willing to pursue claims individually or collectively, supported by clever lawyers. And Australian courts, which have shown themselves adept at developing “their” law creatively to meet new situations and circumstances, may still play a central role in protecting the qualities of being human in the brave new world of automation. ●

To order a copy of Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies with a 15 per cent discount click here. Use discount voucher code BCLUB18 at the checkout to apply the discount.

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But wait, I hear Sheryl Sandberg shuffling her familiar talking points: Facebook isn’t a publisher, and Zuckerberg’s not a media mogul.

Facebook has long maintained that it’s a tech company, not a media company, and doesn’t write the news that appears on the platform. The all-important implication is that, unlike a media company, Facebook needn’t take ultimate responsibility for what it distributes. But Zuckerberg let something slip in the hearing that he’d previously refused to acknowledge.

Just like Rupert Murdoch, the Facebook CEO was well prepped for his much-anticipated appearance before both houses of Congress. NBC reported that he took part in four mock hearings beforehand, and he sat on an elevated cushion (Twitter called it a “booster seat”) to create the right sense of authority. At one point he made the mistake of leaving his notes open long enough for an enterprising Associated Press photographer to snap a pic. They included answers crafted for difficult questions like Will you resign? (No, of course not) and Should Facebook be broken up? (No, that’ll help China). Problem was, none of these questions came up during the interrogation — if that’s what you call handballing the gazillionaire a series of soft questions while delivering a gentle massage to the temples.

The reason for the hearing? To grill Zuckerberg about social media data privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica revelations. The topics covered? Facebook’s terms of service; social media addiction and our brains; foreign interference in elections; law enforcement access to data; illegal discrimination in advertising; the lack of diversity in the tech biz; hate speech; monopoly and competition; whether Facebook is listening to users’ conversations (nope); and, yes, the difference between platforms and publishers. Short of asking Zuckerberg to remind them what their password was, the senators covered pretty much everything with the lightest, most unilluminating line of questioning that could have been hoped for by one of the most powerful men in the world.

Sure, the wide-ranging nature of the questioning points to how Facebook has successfully penetrated almost every part of our lives. But its unfocused nature meant that Zuckerberg didn’t really reveal much that we didn’t already know. He did, however, drop one no-shit-Sherlock statement. “I agree we are responsible for the content,” he said. It seems like a reasonable and simple enough thing to say, but no one from the company has ever uttered those words before. And with good reason.

Zuckerberg tried to walk back from those comments later in the session. “I agree that we’re responsible for the content,” he said, “but we don’t produce the content.” He reiterated that he sees Facebook as a tech company, not a media company, but acknowledged that it has a certain responsibility to its users. That responsibility isn’t editorial in nature, he added.

What wasn’t contained in Zuckerberg’s notes was the admission that it’s much less complicated and much more lucrative to simply harvest the content of reputable mastheads, run it alongside material from disreputable hate sites, and claim you are merely distributing content curated by an algorithm.

Many of us in the media have watched for years now as Facebook has hoovered up our work and made millions off it, leaving crumbs for the actual publications that commissioned, funded and published the stuff. Facebook’s modus operandi also has grave and dangerous implications for any serious effort to fact-check, verify and effectively police hate speech. Never mind the fact that last year 99 per cent of all new ad revenue went to Facebook and Google. That’s ad revenue that used to pay for making news.

Admitting that Facebook is a media company would require Facebook to take responsibility for its role in the spread of fake news, propaganda and illegal Russian meddling in the US election. It opens the way for Facebook to be regulated in the way media companies are, and it would also make it harder to, say, enter the Chinese market.

In the course of his appearance before Congress, Zuckerberg came close to admitting that Facebook needed to address these links, and even conceded that some kind of regulation was inevitable.

But now that we’ve squeezed out that admission, it’s all a bit after the fact. News is in no way the main game for Facebook these days. It never really was. Earlier this year Zuckerberg announced changes to the platform’s newsfeed to prioritise posts from friends and family over content posted by news organisations and businesses. As BuzzFeed wrote in an internal memo after the announcement sent media companies into a panic spiral, “Facebook is breaking up with news.”

As the Cambridge Analytica scandal has reminded us, any users of this platform, whether they’re casual baby-spam uploaders or publishers trying to get more eyeballs, should know that they are entirely vulnerable to the whims of Facebook.

In many ways, we expect way too much of Mark Zuckerberg. He might aspire to be president these days, even pulling a Bill Gates move with his billions and hiring private pollsters to take the pulse of his popularity (or lack thereof), but let’s not forget that his first foray into software creation was Harvard’s Hot or Not. (For an entertaining/spine-chilling parlour game, read over the blog posts Mark Zuckerberg wrote while developing the Facemash software and then remind yourself that this is one of the most powerful people on Earth.)

Then again, maybe we don’t expect enough of him. Like basic accountability and transparency.

Yes, the number of Facebook users under twenty-five is declining. And yes, the company’s reputation has taken a hit. But it’s worth noting that the Avaaz petition calling on Zuckerberg to “fix Facebook” has had the most shares, by roughly five times any other outlet, on — yes — Facebook. That some of the US senators calling for action on data privacy livestreamed their questioning on, that’s right, Facebook Live. That the outstanding Observer coverage of Cambridge Analytica has been shared most widely on, yep, don’t make me say it. And finally, that in response to Zuckerberg’s appearance in Congress, Facebook shares saw their biggest one-day gain in nearly two years.

And, for all Zuckerberg’s promises to take users’ data concerns seriously, just days after he sat on his booster seat before Congress, Facebook moved more than 1.5 billion users, including Australians, out of reach of European privacy law, despite his promise to apply the “spirit” of the legislation globally.

The next step is to actually make a fuss about this stuff. The data problem isn’t exclusive to Facebook: the internet’s entire business model is built upon it. But Facebook is a handy target, and a high-profile one. More of us are getting our news from social media than ever before. Zuckerberg’s admission that Facebook is responsible for content should have implications for all internet platforms. But only if we care enough to demand it. ●

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This week’s program, “Democracy, Data and Dirty Tricks,” was a collaborative venture from Britain’s Independent Television News and Channel 4. Their combined resources enabled an ambitious and multifaceted approach to a subject of the greatest international importance. The episode shown on Monday night focused on the involvement of Cambridge Analytica in the last Kenyan election and, more famously, in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign of 2016. This was the first of a two-part British investigation; the ABC has yet to announce whether it will air the second, which covers elections in Mexico and the Brexit campaign in Britain.

Cambridge Analytica is in the business of trying to manage voters’ perceptions in order to influence the results of elections. It does this by mining personal data on social media, purportedly to create intricate profiles of individual voters. All this is well known from the almost daily rollout of news coverage and analysis. We’ve seen clips of whistleblower Chris Wylie, a former director of research for the company, giving evidence to the British parliament, and of Mark Zuckerberg testifying to Congress about Facebook’s involvement.

Investigative journalists have been following the story since the vice-president of Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, backed by hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, became involved in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Notable among the print media sleuths has been Carole Cadwalladr, and there is not much in this documentary that has not been covered in her articles for the Guardian.

But this is a story about the impact of media on human intelligence, and television provides opportunities to intensify the impact of the story itself. Viewers can follow extended and interconnected lines of narrative that move backwards and forwards in time. On camera, the players can be read through their expressions and mannerisms, their calculated modes of self-presentation made transparent by the framework of commentary.

Wylie, with his pink hair, outsized spectacles and shirt bearing the word Warszawa (Warsaw), is filmed sitting on the pavement next to a mural. He is interviewed in a half-finished building with a ladder leaning against the wall behind him. Is he trying to assume the persona of a dissident who has left the corporate world for bohemia? The affectation doesn’t help his credibility as a witness.

Interviewer Andy Davies adopts a sceptical approach, listening with his arms folded as he pursues an adversarial line of questioning. “You were at the heart of it,” he says. “Why are you speaking out now?” He mentions a legal dispute between Wylie and his former employers; no doubt there are scores to be settled? Wylie’s response is straight out of the PR playbook. He tells us he feels tainted by the political order he thinks he helped to create. “Some people would say it was rank hypocrisy,” Davies responds.

There’s no convincing answer to that charge, but when it comes to relaying the details of Cambridge Analytica’s practices, Wylie is back on form with a well-honed repertoire of images and phrases. There’s “a dangerous alchemy to CA’s art,” he says. The information you put out on social media is run through an app that learns who you are. Then it crawls through your social networks and harvests data from all your friends. “If you have curated your entire self online, and I have captured that…” Then what?

As Wylie warms to his narrative, it sounds more and more like a case for Harry Potter. This kind of language is supposed to make us paranoid, of course, and paranoia is ultimately the product Cambridge Analytica has to sell. It’s not hard to generate, and it is all too easy to market if you’re willing to trade in what is effectively the cultural equivalent of a nerve agent. Paranoia, with the discourse of hate in which it is couched, is the primary ingredient of all forms of propaganda.

And isn’t that what this business is fundamentally about? As I watched the unfolding dialogues, I found myself wondering if this hyper-sophisticated new media “product” that has sent us running away in droves from the happy playground of our Facebook pages is no more than bog-standard propaganda of the kind that’s churned out daily on the front pages of the right-wing tabloids and in the studios of Fox News.

The data-gathering itself may be a sophisticated exercise, at least from a technical point of view. Cambridge Analytica drew on the expertise of a researcher in psychometrics at Cambridge University, who helped to create the source codes for the online personality tests posted on social media. Alexander Nix, CEO of the company, is shown giving a presentation in which he outlines the sociological aspects of what he calls a “psychographic” methodology. On the screen behind him, pictures appear of random human subjects about to have their souls sucked into the all-seeing apps that are the ultimate political weapons of the information age.

Clearly, the editorial line of the program is that we should be afraid, very afraid. But television communicates through what you see, rather than what you are told. And what anyone with half a brain might see here is a second-rate salesman peddling a product that works about as well as the mechanised rapid-feeding system in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Most tests based on multiple-choice options have the target accuracy of the corncob spinner that sprays kernels all over Chaplin’s tray.

“Psychographics” may be no more than a marketing ploy designed to lend mystique to a pretty ordinary exercise in demographic analysis. Where Cambridge Analytica has added to the conventional approach is in its capacity to map an electorate so that messages can be targeted with greater precision to the groups most likely to be susceptible to them.

This is not to say that Cambridge Analytica’s activities aren’t dangerous. But the question of how it wrought such damage on democratic processes is not one to be answered according to its own spin.

For me, though, the most fascinating — and impressive — aspect of this documentary is the undercover work by a Channel 4 reporter posing as a member of a wealthy Sri Lankan family interested in getting its preferred candidate up at the next election. Speaking in heavily accented English, he asks a succession of naive questions. It’s the prefect strategy: no doubt influenced by some unacknowledged racism, his interlocutors seem to see him as easily taken for a ride, which makes them all the more easily deceived themselves.

In a succession of meetings held at London hotels, Nix and the manager of his “political division,” Mark Turnbull, are off-guard and urbane. After impressing the prospective client with a brief homily about “the two fundamental human drivers — hope and fear,” they begin to spell out some tactics that are in a very different league from those described in their corporate presentations.

First, they explain, it’s about getting useful information on rival candidates. Cambridge Analytica has partnerships with organisations that do that kind of thing, organisations that employ former MI5 operatives. And then there is the sting: you invite them to a lunch, lure them with a dodgy deal, and get it on video. Another option is the honey trap. Tempt them with some gorgeous girls. “Not Sri Lankan girls?” the client asks anxiously. No, no, they assure him. Ukrainians. The company can arrange this kind of thing. They work with fake IDs, set up websites… All part of the service.

This sequence of interviews is a genuine coup. Here they are, falling victim to the very strategies they are describing. If you are in the business of studying human psychology, you might be aware that those most easily manipulated are often people who like to manipulate others. (Facebook thinks I’m twenty-one, a minor but effective deception I adopted in order to avoid ads for Botox.) Assuming the world is full of dupes and suckers, they see everything in terms of the scenarios they have created, and reality can creep up behind them.

Though that’s not always what happens. Cambridge Analytica might well have got away with its shady dealings if it were not for the world of investigative journalism and the whistleblowers who are able to access it. We still don’t know how the consequences of the exposure will play out. Will there be a replay of the Brexit referendum, following the revelations of how Cambridge Analytica bent the campaign rules? Will Facebook survive its loss of face?

The biggest question is whether the outing of this kind of electoral manipulation will have any impact on the way elections are run. Somehow that seems doubtful. If vicious propaganda material can get mass circulation, democracy will continue to be at risk of sabotage. Its best defence is reliable news media, vigilant in resisting pressure and resourced for genuine and fearless investigation. Here, there are forces steadily eroding the ABC’s mettle, and people in power who’d like to see it cave in altogether. ●

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But what about the files we’re not allowed to see? During 2017 at least 1140 government files were withheld from the public. Amid the celebrations each year, we should perhaps take time to investigate the limits of access.

A researcher wanting to see a file from 1967 entitled “Hong Kong — Communist Activities Within the Colony” could have finished two PhDs in the time it took for the file to be processed.

Recent days have provided an example of accelerated release of cabinet documents via filing cabinet. The official process is more controlled. Under the Archives Act, files more than twenty years old (reduced from thirty years in 2010) are said to be in the “open period.” But that doesn’t mean we automatically get to see them. Before they’re released to the public, records go through a process known as “access examination.” Their contents are checked against a series of exemptions defined under section 33 of the Archives Act, which cover things like national security and individual privacy. Most records are opened without restriction. Some end up as “open with exception” and have pages removed or text redacted. A smaller number are withheld completely and are assigned the access status of “closed.”

Each January for the last three years, I’ve harvested the details of all “closed” files from RecordSearch, the NAA’s online database. RecordSearch only displays the current status of a file, so by taking annual snapshots I’m hoping to expose trends and anomalies, and build up a historical picture of the access examination process. But snapshots of an active system will always be missing data, so anomalies appear in the details presented below. As you’ll see, it’s more of an archaeological dig than a rigorous statistical analysis.

The important thing is that we can ask questions of the harvested data that we can’t ask through RecordSearch’s own search interface. For example, why are files closed? The 2016 harvest showed that the privacy exemption, section 33(1)(g) of the Archives Act, was invoked most frequently. No surprises there.

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“Closed period” was cited in 2565 cases, but a little analysis revealed that the contents of most of these files were, by 2016, in the open period. There’s no time limit or mandatory review for closed files — they stay closed until someone requests them to be re-examined. More mysteriously, there were 3410 closed files labelled “Pre access recorder.” It turned out these were files closed before the introduction of the Archives Act in 1983.

The NAA dealt with some of these oddities in 2016 by changing the access status of most “Pre access recorder” and “Closed period” files from “closed” to “not yet examined.” They’re no longer closed, but neither are they any more open. Before being released they’ll need to re-enter the access examination pipeline and may yet be closed again. Swings and roundabouts.

These changes meant that the total number of closed files in the 2017 harvest dropped dramatically by about 25 per cent. The year’s harvest didn’t show any major shifts, but the total number of closed files increased by 484 to a total of 11,235.

Number of closed files at each harvest date
1 January 2016 — 14,370
9 January 2017 — 10,751
1 January 2018 — 11,235

Comparing the reasons cited across the three annual harvests, it seems that the number of national security exemptions (33(1)(a) & (b) of the Archives Act) are trending down. Privacy (33(1)(g)) looks steady after a big jump in 2016 due to the processing of repatriation files from men and women who served in the first world war. What’s most worrying for researchers is the steady increase in closed files citing “Withheld pending advice.” These are records that have been referred to other government agencies for their advice. As we’ll see, this can cause significant delays.• Enlarge this chart

So, what happened in 2017? As I mentioned, at least 1140 files were closed. But on the other side of the ledger, the access status of 623 files changed from “closed” to something else. Overall, there was a net increase of 517 closed files.

You might have noticed I keep fudging my findings. There were at least 1140 files closed in 2017, because it’s possible that some files were closed, then “un-closed” between my snapshots. And why un-closed? Couldn’t we just say “opened”? Unfortunately, it’s a bit more complicated. Most of the files that stopped being closed in 2017 are now “open with exception,” with parts of them still being withheld. Only 210 closed files were opened without restriction:

Number of files with new access status
Open — 210
Open with exception — 408
Not yet examined — 5

Just to add to the uncertainty, 189 files apparently went missing between harvests, while 173 mysteriously appeared carrying access decision dates prior to 2017. This is probably due to changes in the organisation and description of the records on RecordSearch, but I won’t know until I’ve examined them all in detail. Once again, it’s a case of trying to fill in the gaps between snapshots.

If we break down 2017’s “closed” and “un-closed” files by reason, we can see where the action was last year. Most of the changes were in the “Withheld pending advice,” or WPA, category. As mentioned, these files have been referred to other agencies for their input on the access examination process. They’re not finally closed — they’re in a sort of archival limbo, awaiting judgement on their access status. As a result, we’d expect a fair bit of coming and going — but the net increase of 377 files in this category indicates there might be a blockage in the pipeline.

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What sort of files are they? If we look at the 973 files closed in 2017 as WPA we see that the overwhelming majority come from just one series — A1838. This is the main correspondence series of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, and is critical in understanding the evolution of Australia’s external relations. Of the 4215 closed files citing WPA on 1 January this year, 2121 (50.3 per cent) were waiting for DFAT.

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This will come as no surprise to anyone investigating the history of Australian foreign policy. Delays in gaining access to files from A1838 have become the stuff of horror stories for would-be researchers.

When I analysed the 2016 harvest I noted that there were 1467 files in the WPA bucket that had been waiting more than three years for a decision. If we look at the files that were “un-closed” in 2017, we can calculate the length of the access examination process. A total of 595 files emerged from the WPA backlog last year, taking on average three years and seventy-seven days to complete their journey. If we focus just on A1838, the average time taken was three years and 195 days. The quickest turnaround was just 163 days, but four files clocked up over seven years in limbo. A researcher wanting to see a file from 1967 entitled “Hong Kong — Communist Activities Within the Colony” could have finished two PhDs in the time it took for the file to be processed.

Up until last year, the NAA provided information on access examination outcomes in its annual report. But WPA files were excluded from the total number reported as “closed.” You can understand why — a final decision hadn’t been made on the fate of these records. But while they might not be finally closed, delays of three years or more make them effectively closed. This is the reality of access. A lack of transparency and accountability frustrates users and undermines confidence in the process.

In recent years the NAA has attempted to streamline access examination. But with the number of WPA files rising by about 400 per year, more needs to be done. The NAA’s 2016–17 annual report highlighted a review of the access examination process by Paul O’Sullivan, formerly a deputy secretary in DFAT and head of ASIO from 2005 to 2009. In response the NAA has, according to its director-general, “taken steps to strengthen the integrity of the process and to ensure that as much as possible is released in a timely way.” We can only wait and see.

None of this should distract us from the fact that government records more than twenty years old are expected to be open to public scrutiny. The rules in section 33 of the Archives Act are called “exemptions” for a reason. The files released on 1 January each year are not a gift to researchers. They are opened because we have the right to see them. Only by understanding the legislative and bureaucratic processes through which access is constructed can we protect these rights. •

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