The Internet Is Not the Answer (18 page)

Whether or not Instagram wants to own our photos, it certainly wants to own us. The personal is, indeed, the economic. Backed by millions of dollars of investment from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the whole point of the free Instagram app is to make money by mining its users’ data. And Instagram’s business model—like those of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter, Snapchat, and most other successful Internet companies—is based upon advertising, a strategy it formally introduced in November 2013.

In “exchange” for using its app, our photos reveal to Instagram more and more about our tastes, our movements, and our friends. The app reverses the camera lens. That’s why Facebook paid a billion dollars for Systrom’s creation. The
Hello this is me
economy is actually more selfie-centric than even James Franco imagined. We think we are using Instagram to look at the world, but actually we are the ones who are being watched. And the more we reveal about ourselves, the more valuable we become to advertisers. So, for example, had I posted those snaps of Kodak’s Rochester world headquarters up on Instagram, the app, by taking advantage of the location data on my iPhone, would have fed me back advertisements with special deals for hotels or, perhaps more appropriately, given the city’s dire economic situation, employment agencies in Rochester. As its parent company, Facebook, is already doing, Instagram might even eventually integrate my photo into an advertisement and use it as an endorsement for a product or service featured in my post. All without my permission or even my knowledge.

And it’s here that we find the most disturbing flaw in the data factory economy. “Free,” you see, is anything but free. Instagram’s greatest deceit is taking our self-love to its darkest and most twisted economic end—a nightmarish conclusion that, in homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 classic movie about a private eye who is the victim of an elaborately staged murder, I dubbed, in my last book,
Digital Vertigo
. It creates a surreal economy in which we are not only the creator of the networked product, but also the product itself. The personal revolution, then, is way more
personal
than most of us would like. Hitchcock himself, the master of the “second plotline,” couldn’t have come up with a better subtext to the selfie economy. The data factory’s core economic value is all the personal information extracted from its free laborers. As in one of Hitchcock’s dark movies, it’s
you
—the innocent bystander, the everyman—who is the victim of something that we neither understand nor control.

From social media networks like Twitter and Facebook to the world’s second most valuable company, Google, the exploitation of our personal information is the engine of the “big data” economy. All these companies want to know us so intimately that they can package us up and then,
without our consent
, sell us back to advertisers. This greed for personal data is what Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and one of the inventors of pop-up online ads, describes as the World Wide Web’s “original sin”—a “fiasco,” Zuckerman says, which forces Internet startups that give away their product for free to move “deeper into the world of surveillance.” “
It’s obvious now that what we did was a fiasco
,” he writes acidly about the “good intentions” of Internet pioneers like himself, “s
o let me remind you that what we wanted to do was something brave and noble.”
⁵⁶

Zuckerman’s biblical metaphor is an apt description of the Internet’s fall from grace. Facebook, for example, a company that was supposedly designed to unite the world, is so guilty of taking advantage of children’s images in their ads that a number of US privacy, consumer-rights, and children’s nonprofits, as well as parents of exploited teenagers, like the filmmaker Annie Leonard, are involved in a bitter legal dispute to shield kids from this disgraceful exploitation. “You probably won’t even know when your family is suddenly starring in a commercial. Neither will your kid, unless she enjoys fine print more than status updates,” Leonard wrote in 2014. “But contrary to what Mark Zuckerberg would have you believe, there’s not a fine line between a selfie and a sponsored post.”
⁵⁷

Speaking of
fine lines
and
original sin
, Google, with its suite of free products such as Search, Gmail, its Google+ social network, and YouTube, is the most sophisticated of these big data companies at marketing itself as a selfless nonprofit while simultaneously grossly exploiting its innocent users. Google is already integrating our posts and our photos into advertisements that are then viewed by the billion people who access the two million sites on its display advertising network. Google, whose intentions, like those of Facebook, were no doubt good, is now quite literally transforming us into display ads for their advertising business. We are not only the unpaid product in this economy, but also are becoming the billboards for displaying Google’s advertising. Once upon a time, companies paid people to walk up and down the street wearing so-called sandwich boards that displayed advertising. Now we all do it for free.

As Google’s then CEO Eric Schmidt confessed to the
Financial Times
back in 2007, Google wants to know us better than we know ourselves so that it can tell us not only what jobs we should take but also how we want to spend our day.
⁵⁸
“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been,” Schmidt told the
Atlantic
’s editor James Bennet in September 2010. “We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
⁵⁹
This is the real reason why Google spent $500 million in 2014 on the artificial intelligence startup DeepMind—a technology that, according to
The
Information
’s Amir Efrati, wants to “make computers think like humans.”
⁶⁰
By thinking like us, by being able to join the dots in our mind, Google will own us. And by owning us—our desires, our intentions, our career goals, above all our buying habits—Google will own the networked future.

The Silicon Valley insider and technology critic Jaron Lanier argues “the future should be
our
theater.”
⁶¹
But the problem with the data factory economy is that we have become the show that is being played in somebody else’s theater. And unlike professional actors, we aren’t even being paid for our labor. No wonder Lanier is nostalgic for a time when we were optimistic about the future.

I miss the future, too. And to rediscover my enthusiasm for it, I need to go back a quarter century, to a place called Berwick Street in Soho, London.

CHAPTER FIVE
THE CATASTROPHE
OF ABUNDANCE

The Narrow Stump

I grew up in England. No, not the England of Winston Churchill’s exclusive gentleman’s clubs or
Downton Abbey
’s bucolic aristocracy and their unnaturally cheerful servants. Rather than a nostalgic costume drama, my England was London. And my London was Soho—the square-mile district in London’s West End that is not only the historic center of the city’s fashion business, but also the heart of its independent movie and music industries.

As a kid growing up in the swinging London of the late sixties and seventies, I got to see a much more entertaining show in Soho than anything a
Downton Abbey
–style TV drama could muster. My family was in the rag trade and owned a store on the edge of Soho, so I had the good fortune to spend much of my adolescence wandering around its abundant clubs, cafés, and records stores, and its other, more adult attractions. They were the glory years of the English recorded music industry—a period of remarkable creative fecundity in which London in general and Soho in particular appeared, to me at least, to be the center of the creative universe. The Beatles, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Queen, Elton John, and David Bowie all played at Soho clubs like the Marquee and recorded albums in Soho’s Trident Studios. Eric Clapton and the Sex Pistols lived there for a while, while the Kinks’s 1970 hit “Lola” was set in a particularly adventurous Soho sex club.

My family owned a store called Falbers Fabrics, on the corner of Oxford Street, Europe’s busiest shopping street, and Berwick Street, a narrow stump of a street that ran down into the strip clubs and massage parlors of what is euphemistically known as “Old Soho.” Berwick Street had a special place in my family’s history. It was the street on which my great-grandfather, Victor Falber, an immigrant entrepreneur from the Polish town of Plock, first set up shop in the early twentieth century—a time when almost everyone, from aristocrats to servants, made their own clothes. He was a woolens and silk market trader, carting his goods every day from London’s East End to Berwick Street market and selling to dressmakers who would then invest their labor in creating finished clothing. Later, my great-grandfather’s business would graduate to a physical store, first at the bottom of Berwick Street and then as “Falbers Fabrics,” one of London’s best-known fabric retailers, on Oxford Street. And even today, the name Victor Falber remains imprinted on a Berwick Street wall. Outside 12 Berwick Street, there is a marble plinth above the offices of the building’s current tenant, a creative agency that produces viral online videos.
V. FALBER & SONS
, it still says, the ghostlike reminder of a makers’ economy in which clothing was self-made rather than mass-produced in a factory.

In comparison with the vertiginous ups and downs of San Francisco’s Battery Street and Rochester’s Factory Street over the last twenty-five years, the fortunes of Soho’s Berwick Street haven’t dramatically changed since 1989. Had you strolled down Berwick Street in 1989 and then, having fallen asleep for a quarter of a century, taken that same half-mile stroll once again in 2014, things wouldn’t have appeared, on first glance at least, to be much different from before. You’d still find a traffic-clogged street packed with stores, clubs, pubs, and restaurants popular with both tourists and the workers employed by Soho’s many media and fashion companies. And you’d still find a vibrant open-air market at the south end of the street, with tradesmen loudly hawking their fruit and vegetables, flowers, and cheap household goods.

But, if you looked carefully enough, there are some things on Berwick Street that have indeed changed over the last twenty-five years. In 1989, the year that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web, Berwick Street was known as the “Golden Mile of Vinyl.” The street was then famous for its more than twenty specialty record stores, covering every genre of music—from bluegrass, reggae, and electronic and house to soul, funk, jazz, and classical. These stores had all been opened after the introduction of Sony and Philips’s compact disc format in the early eighties—beginning in 1984 with Reckless Records, a store that became so popular that five years later, it opened a sister branch in Chicago.

It was a golden age of media. Back in 1989, Berwick Street not only hosted what the
Independent
newspaper called the “greatest concentration of record shops in Britain”;
¹
it was also the center of independent musical life in London. Abbey Road, the St. Johns Wood street a few miles north of Soho immortalized on the cover of the eponymous 1969 Beatles record, might be the most famous musical street in London, but Berwick Street isn’t too far behind. An
Abbey Road
– style photograph of the street was even featured on the cover of Oasis’s album
(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?,
one of the most successful records in British music history, which, after its release in October 1995, was selling two copies a minute in the HMV superstore on Oxford Street.
²
Today, however, neither the HMV superstore nor the Golden Mile of Vinyl exists. Reckless Records—where a cover of
(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
is nostalgically displayed in its window—is still there. But in 2014, there were only four or five other record stores left on Berwick Street. The glory years are over. Like Victor Falber and his makers’ clothing economy, the Golden Mile of Vinyl is now history.

As an avid music collector, I spent many happy hours wandering up and down Berwick Street in the eighties.
BUY SELL TRADE,
all the stores advertised on their windows. It was my introduction to the “buy, sell, trade” economics of scarce creative goods. Just as my great-grandfather sold valuable woolens or silk in Berwick Street market, so the merchants on the Golden Mile of Vinyl sold valuable musical recordings like the LP version of
(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
or the seven-inch single of the Kinks’s “Lola.”
Price was determined by demand. The scarcer the product, the more demand from buyers, the higher the price. And if you didn’t think the price was right, then you could always go next door and buy there. It was a perfect market.

It was a perfect cultural experience, too. The former
Wired
editor in chief Chris Anderson invented the idea of the “long tail” to describe the supposed cornucopia of self-produced cultural goods available on the Web. But Berwick Street, that narrow stump of a Soho street, was the real long tail of musical diversity—existing years before Anderson came out with his theory. If you searched hard enough on the Golden Mile of Vinyl and in Soho’s many other independent record shops, you could dig up the most obscure recordings. And if you couldn’t find what you were looking for, or weren’t sure, then the stores employed real human beings, rather than algorithms, to answer questions and give recommendations of what to sample and buy. These human beings weren’t infallible, but they were much more likely to come up with serendipitous recommendations than algorithms that know our entire purchasing history and thus just tell us what we already know.