Fwd: [Right Digitalisation] This is what tech will do to all work, even small businesses (and farmers, and teachers, and health workers, and .. )

[Ashish Kothari]

Friends, as Artificial Intelligence begins to take over more aspects of our lives, this is an interesting story of some kind of resistance.

ashish

The gig workers fighting back against the algorithms

technologyreview.com/2022/04/21/1050381/the-gig-workers-fighting-back-against-the-algorithms

This story is part three of MIT Technology Review’s series on AI colonialism, the idea that artificial intelligence is creating a new colonial world order. It was supported by the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program and the Pulitzer Center. Read the full series here.

In the Bendungan Hilir neighborhood, just a stone’s throw from Jakarta’s glitzy central business district, a long row of makeshift wooden stalls crammed onto the sidewalk serves noodle soup, fried rice, and cigarettes to locals.

One place stands out in particular, buzzing with motorcycle drivers clad in green. It’s an informal “base camp,” or meeting point, for drivers with Gojek, Indonesia’s largest ride-hailing firm—part of the backbone of a growing movement of resistance against the dispatch algorithms that dominate their lives.

Gojek offers motorbike taxis in addition to cars. You can see its trademark green jackets and helmets everywhere as its motorbike drivers take passengers on their back seats, and deliver food and parcels. In between gigs, drivers need to recharge their phones, eat food, and wash up. Since the company doesn’t offer many resting facilities, the community created its own spaces like this one in Bendungan Hilir, colloquially known as Benhil.

Regulars of this location prefer it for its proximity to many of the restaurants popular with Gojek's food delivery customers. They can rest while staying “on-bid,” the local term for being available to take incoming orders—which is crucial because they must maintain that status for hours.

Base camps grew out of a tradition that existed before algorithmic ride-hailing services came to Indonesia. Motorcycle drivers used to offer rides to people informally, and they would gather at street corners and food stalls to trade news and gossip or share tips for staying safe on the road. Once Gojek and other apps arrived, the habit carried over, says Rida Qadri, an MIT computational social scientist who studies Jakarta’s ride-hailing driver communities. Base camps became the network through which drivers around the city stayed in tight communication.

This sense of community is now at the heart of what distinguishes Jakarta’s drivers from other gig workers around the world. While such workers everywhere have felt increasingly squeezed and exploited by unforgiving algorithms, most have struggled to organize and effect concrete changes in the platforms that control their work or the government policies that enable their mistreatment.

Part of this is due to the direct challenge that algorithmic management poses to labor organizers: it pits workers against one another and scatters them across a vast geographical area, says Jason Jackson, a professor of political economy and urban planning at MIT who advised Qadri’s research. By default, it weakens workers’ abilities to connect in person and build the rapport needed to mobilize a movement.

This effect can be seen in the US especially, where Uber drivers haven’t been able to gain an audience with company leadership, let alone generate the momentum to fight against the company’s sophisticated anti-regulation strategies, says Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, who studies and advocates on behalf of US gig workers. “The digital formation of community just isn’t the same,” she says.

But in Jakarta, things have played out differently. Through base camps, drivers don’t just keep each other informed; they support one another and band together to bend Gojek’s system a little more toward their will. It’s opened up new channels of communication with the company and laid the groundwork for lasting policy change.

Over the years, as more and more workers have fallen under the gaze of algorithms, a growing chorus of experts have noted how platform companies have paralleled the practices of colonial empires in using management tools to surveil and exploit a broad base of cheap labor. But the experience of Jakarta’s drivers could reveal a new playbook for resistance: a way for workers to build collective power, achieve a measure of security, and take care of one another when seemingly no one else will.

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The greater Jakarta area is home to more than 30 million people. It’s a vast urban agglomeration that began developing at hyper speed in the 1970s and ’80s. Its main streets are lined with high-rises, malls, and five-star hotels. But a block away, tiny tin-roofed houses form cramped neighborhoods and winding alleys too narrow for cars.

Navigating this city has always been a challenge. Jakarta only opened its first modern metro line in 2019. Daily commutes consist of hours-long rides in cars and buses through gridlocked traffic or old-fashioned trains that pack passengers like sardines.

It was this sheer impossibility of getting around, especially during rush hour, that gave rise to an informal motorcycle taxi economy long before the advent of apps like Gojek. In this unregulated market, drivers (mostly men) with ojeks, the Indonesian word for motorbike taxis, waited on street corners across the city and offered people a lift when they’d run out of options.

For customers, the experience could be frustrating. Drivers organized in groups around different territories, largely based on their own neighborhoods, and sometimes declined to drive long distances. In a crowded commuter area like a train station, it could be stressful to wade through the crush of ojek drivers waving and shouting to get your attention, and to haggle for a price. 

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It was in this chaos that Gojek founder Nadiem Makarim saw a business opportunity. In 2010, Makarim, who’d grown up in a relatively privileged Indonesian family, established a call center to match passengers with trusted motorcycle drivers. For the first time, ojeks were being organized and dispatched by a third party. A year later, he expanded the idea when he joined the e-commerce startup Zalora, letting the company’s last-mile motorcycle delivery fleet ferry individuals around in their downtime.

Then Uber, with its novel algorithmic matchmaking system, entered Indonesia in August 2014. Gojek followed with its own mobile app a few months later, centralizing its existing fleet and consolidating the fractured neighborhood model under a unified set of algorithms.

Ordering ojeks via app, for a predetermined price, was a hit among passengers. It was catnip for investors as well, says Hian Goh, a partner at Singapore-based Openspace Ventures, one of Gojek’s earliest funders. Not only was Uber’s business model growing like crazy—a testament to Gojek’s explosive potential—but Makarim had the perfect founder profile for international investors in Indonesia’s underdeveloped tech scene. After years of elite schooling in Jakarta, he’d gone to an Ivy League college and Harvard Business School before taking a job at the top-tier management consulting firm McKinsey.

As more investor money poured in, there was little concern that Gojek would face any of the labor issues beginning to confront Uber. In the US, Uber had turned taxi driving from a salaried job with benefits into piecemeal gig labor. But in Indonesia, Gojek was turning informal transportation into an orderly, semiformal industry. In the context of the rest of Indonesia’s largely informal economy, which encompassed everything from pop-up food stalls to unlicensed enterprises offering laundry or home cleaning, the government saw the change as a good thing.

At first, drivers did too. Those who signed up with the intention of driving part time were soon quitting their jobs and converting to Gojek full time. Ojek drivers who held onto old forms of organization were squeezed out as the company bought out their colleagues with hefty bonuses and promises of earnings as much as triple their existing income.

But in exchange for the early gains, workers lost a significant amount of their agency. Where ojek drivers previously had a say in their pay and working conditions, there was now only obedience to the platform’s policies and its all-seeing algorithm.

Soon Gojek’s newly minted fleet began to feel the impact of this reality. As the company onboarded more and more drivers, jobs dwindled and prices dropped with excessive supply. Then as it entered into relentless price wars with its Singaporean competitor Grab, it reduced drivers’ bonuses, forcing them to work longer hours for the same money.

“When I interview representatives of the driver community, they say that their life in Gojek is like a drug addiction,” says Suci Lestari Yuana, a PhD candidate at Utrecht University, who studies the conflicts and controversies surrounding the platform economy in Indonesia. They watch their income shrink, but “they don’t have other options to get out anymore,” Yuana says. “They understand that they’re very dependent on the company.”

“Our driver partners are the core of our business, and their welfare will always be our top priority,” says Tanah Sullivan, head of sustainability at GoTo Group, Gojek’s parent company. “With the majority driving part-time, the flexibility Gojek offers allows drivers to augment their income with other earning opportunities … Based on our own data, both two-wheel and four-wheel drivers’ overall satisfaction has continued to improve particularly in relation to earnings on our platform.”

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Kejo, in his 30s and father to two young girls, pulls up to the Benhil base camp on his Honda scooter around 7 p.m. Like many drivers, he sports the logo of his driver community, Gojek on Twit, or GoT, an informal collective he helped form in 2017 that stays connected through base camps and online groups.

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Today his work day, which usually starts in the early afternoon, ended with an unexpected long-distance ride. It was tiring, but now he’s satisfied that he hit his daily target. He almost always hits his target, he says with a grin as he digs into a plate of fried rice. He admits he’s among the lucky ones. His account is considered gacor—a term that implies it’s inexplicably blessed with a steady stream of fresh orders.

Kejo (who, like many Indonesians, has only one name) joined Gojek in 2015, right when the app exploded in popularity. Though three-quarters of Indonesia’s employed perform informal work, according to the OECD, he hadn’t been among them; as a car salesman and a bank teller, he’d held stable jobs with benefits. But when Uber, Grab, and then Gojek came onto the scene, ride-hailing had a certain allure. It promised greater freedom than an office job—and, crucially, more money.

Indeed, he could earn 700,000 to 800,000 Indonesian rupiah (roughly $48 to $56) per day through 2016, when Gojek rewarded the most active “driver-partners” with generous bonuses. That could translate into an income that was significantly higher than the minimum wage in Jakarta, which is 4.6 million IDR, or $320, per month.

These days he instead makes 300,000 IDR ($21) at most, if he works from 2 p.m. to 7 or 8. Over time, Gojek phased out its bonuses as its driver network increased and it faced growing competition.

Kejo shrugs. He doesn’t let this bother him, but that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. Small incidents like delivering a package to the wrong door can lead a driver’s account to be frozen or closed, if the driver isn’t proactive in explaining what happened or solving the problem. The algorithm also penalizes workers for being inactive, even if they’re sick with covid. This demotes their account status and costs them access to more regular jobs.

“It really gives workers no option other than to keep working,” says Amalinda Savirani, an associate professor at Gadjah Mada University, who studies social movements among the urban poor in Indonesia. “The technology has become an instrument for this labor exploitation.”

“We have a number of measures in place that directly improve working conditions and provide opportunities for advancement of drivers, including education and training, health insurance, sick pay, and wellbeing initiatives,” Sullivan says. “These are in addition to comprehensive programs introduced to support driver partners across our ecosystem amid the challenges brought about by the pandemic.”

Kejo finds support in GoT. It evolved organically around a handful of people like him, who’d joined ride-hailing early and wrote about their experiences on social media.

Kejo's specialty is identifying scams and warning drivers about them. Some drivers, new to using smartphones, can make easy targets: for example, sometimes fraudsters call, pretending to be Gojek employees, and steal login details and personal information. He uses his network to track new scams and their prevalence, and broadcasts them on his personal Twitter account, which has over 17,000 followers.

Any Gojek driver with a social media account can choose to participate, says Liam, another early GoT member. If one person shares a tip or a concern, it quickly travels through a loose network of WhatsApp and Telegram groups and across social media.

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GoT also assists with “everyday problems on the road,” says Budi Prakoso, who connected with the group as a regular at the Benhil base camp. Once when his motorbike broke down, he immediately broadcast it to the group, and a nearby member arrived to help him out.

Qadri says there are hundreds of driver communities like GoT that have emerged from the base camps in Jakarta. Drivers will check in with each other daily for everything from advice on the best routes for a delivery to strategies for improving their earnings. During the pandemic, they distributed funds and food boxes to each other’s families, helping them weather otherwise devastating income disruptions from temporary ride-hailing bans and strict lockdowns.

For female drivers, who are a minority on the platforms, informal communities are also a way to stay safe. Rita Sari, who drives for Gojek’s four-wheel service GoCar, broadcasts her live location to GoT whenever she takes a ride to an unfamiliar neighborhood, especially at night. It doesn’t matter that GoT’s members are mostly drivers for Gojek’s motorbike-based services. Their solidarity extends beyond that peer group and even to drivers from rival firms like Grab.

Support comes from the broader community as well. Base camps form and sustain themselves through relationships between drivers and the neighborhood: business owners provide spaces, local authorities approve their use for regular gatherings, food stalls and mosques double up as makeshift shelters for young men without local family or housing who’ve moved to Jakarta to increase their Gojek earnings.

In this way, the many layers of social connections are crucial to helping drivers survive, Qadri says. And it was atop this foundation that the resistance first started.

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It began with drivers converging on little hacks to make their daily work a bit easier. As more and more peers confronted the same frustrations, they spread their tricks through the networks like any other piece of information. Over time, those tricks matured into what Savirani describes as “everyday resistance”—tactics that helped drivers, absent any institutional support, to regain control in tiny, cumulative ways.

Kejo prefers a strategy known as “account therapy,” a way to coax Gojek’s algorithm when it isn’t supplying enough of the desired orders. He used to have an account that gave him mostly food deliveries but found it too difficult to keep up during the rainy season. Having observed that the Gojek app learns drivers’ preferences by keeping track of which jobs they accept, he began repeatedly rejecting food orders and accepting only passenger rides. After he persisted through a week of days without any work, the system finally "got it,” he says.

Other drivers who are skilled in deciphering the mysteries of the algorithm offer paid “therapy services” to those who are struggling. A therapist will take over a client’s phone for a week and slowly coax the account back to health before returning it to its owner.

Then there are more sophisticated hacks. The more tech-savvy in the driver communities have developed an entire ecosystem of unauthorized apps that help drivers tweak and tune their accounts, Qadri says. Some are relatively trivial, built simply to eliminate a reliance on Gojek’s engineering team: they enlarge the text on the app’s user interface to improve its readability, or help drivers accept jobs automatically, a feature Gojek has by now incorporated.

But the most popular, with more than half a million downloads, spoof a phone’s GPS. They can give the illusion that a driver who is resting is still working. This can avoid penalties for sick time or help quickly graduate an account to higher levels with more earning potential. Such apps can also give drivers access to places with high customer demand without requiring them to muscle into crowded spaces.

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All of these apps are known as tuyul, after a mythological creature in Indonesian folklore that steals money on behalf of its owner (though sometimes at a great price). If Gojek catches a driver using a tuyul, it suspends the account. This has led to an app war, Savirani says:developers build increasingly complex features to hide from Gojek’s detection systems as Gojek develops increasingly complex trackers to find them.

As driver networks have grown and accumulated political capital, they’ve also sought to agitate for broader reforms. They use social media to protest undesirable app updates or push for feature requests. Gojek now sends representatives to base camps to seek feedback and buy-in from drivers about forthcoming changes.

Just recently, GoT pushed through what Budi considers a breakthrough. Drivers often have to pay parking fees out of their own pocket if they pick up a food order. But after they campaigned against the policy, Gojek is now passing the fee on to customers at select mall and office locations. It’s also added an internal reporting mechanism that lets drivers earn a little extra income for sending updates about which malls charge parking fees and how much, Budi says. 

“Drivers feel much more empowered, through their community structure, to reach out to management and negotiate with them in a way that I haven’t seen among Uber and Lyft drivers in the US,” Qadri says.

It’s not just management but regulators as well. When Jakarta was preparing to host the Asian Games in 2018, Garda, another motorbike taxi drivers’ association, threatened a strike that would have disrupted the flow of transportation to and from the sporting events. The prospect of such humiliation for Indonesia on the world stage was pressure enough to get the Ministry of Transportation to meet with the drivers.

As a result, the ministry finally recognized motorbike taxis, which had previously lacked legal status. That will pave the way for regulation to improve their working conditions, Yuana says.

Dubal says these successes offer an important lesson to labor rights advocates outside of Indonesia: that a strong social infrastructure can be a powerful antidote to technical fragmentation. “You don’t get the kind of regulations you want without worker power, and you don’t have worker power without worker community,” she says.

That doesn’t mean the fight is over. Far from it: motorbike drivers, and app-based transportation services as a whole, are still largely unprotected by the law in Indonesia, says Taha Syarafil, the chairman of the drivers’ association Asosiasi Driver Online. And relying on everyday resistance and mutual aid to improve conditions without proper legal rights won’t be tenable forever.

Day by day, Gojek has tightened its controls on unauthorized apps and more severely cracked down on infractions. The company has also begun to buy the allegiance of some leaders in driver communities through tactics such as giving them early access to new features and awarding them side jobs.

But emboldened by their initial wins, drivers—especially those part of formal organizations like Asosiasi Driver Online—are now planning to push for more regulatory changes. This includes passing a law to recognize gig work at the highest level of government, which would enable the Ministries of Transportation and Labor to enforce minimum standards for ride-hailing companies’ treatment of drivers.

Even if that happens, though, informal communities will continue to play a role in easing whatever challenges come with the job—distributing food aid, helping with flat tires, raising money for a hospitalized friend. “The solidarity is strong,” Liam says. “Very, very strong.”

Read the rest of MIT Technology Review's series on AI Colonialism here.

[Patrick Bond]

On 7/24/2022 7:36 AM, Ashish Kothari wrote:

Friends, as Artificial Intelligence begins to take over more aspects of our lives, this is an interesting story of some kind of resistance.

(For a couple of years I've been collecting some of these resistance tales, also known as the 4th Industrial Counter-Revolution.

    We have plenty here. Would love to hear of any others, e.g. below... some appear 'neo-Luddite' - smashing the machinery - but others aim to socialise the tech.)

The Fourth Industrial Revolution in South Africa, and counter-revolutionaries (as of early 2020)

4IR: Fourth Industrial Revolution trends	SA manifestations of degenerate 4IR	4ICR: Fourth Industrial Counter-Revolutionaries
rampant application of Intellectual Property and monopoly patents, thereby excluding poor people from life-saving innovations, especially in public health services	Big Pharma corporations supplied Anti-RetroViral (ARV) medications for AIDS, but at a cost of R100 000 annually (before 2004), aided and abetted by South African leaders Thabo Mbeki, Alec Erwin and Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, by Al Gore and Bill Gates from the U.S, by Western states and by the World Trade Organisation’s Trade Related Intellectual Property System (WTO TRIPS).	Treatment Action Campaign, their labour allies and lawyers, the Constitutional Court, courageous journalists, some senior African National Congress (ANC) officials, and generic medicines firms together rejected IP barriers to ARV access and won WTO TRIPS exemptions in 2001, compelling roll out of free drugs to 5 million, thus raising life expectancy from 52 to 65 since 2005 (1998-2005).
elitist education, driving more working-class people into debt or out of tertiary education	Black, working-class students suffered greater rates of ‘financial exclusion’ at universities, as well as post-school debt defaults.	#FeesMustFall won tuition waivers for 90% of university and technikon students (2015-17).
social media mind-manipulation	Bell Pottinger, the broadcaster ANN7 and the Gupta brothers’ bot army declared war on those politicos, journalists and civil society who were allegedly associated with ‘White Monopoly Capital’ (albeit making such claims without a genuine left agenda, purely as a juvenile Zumite defence mechanism).	SA’s opposition parties (especially the DA and EFF), journalists (especially amaBhungane and Sunday Times) and nearly all other activists in left-wing, centrist and right-wing civil society, as well as Johann Rupert and allied Western Multinational Corporations, together gave Bell Pottinger and ANN7 corporate death sentences, and sent the Guptas into Dubai exile (2016-17).
gradual repression of liberal rights and of social justice activism	The Department of State Security engaged in worsening repression during the Mbeki-Zuma regimes, including the (ill-fated) Protection of State Information Bill.	#Right2Know battled against the ‘Secrecy Bill’ and, alongside conscientious ANC MPs, prevented it from becoming formal law in 2013 (2011-19).
surveillance of citizens’ movements by states and capital	SA National Road Agencies Ltd (Sanral) and Kapsch established ‘e-toll gantries’ across Gauteng’s highways to enforce payment for road use, even though apartheid and post-apartheid housing markets force working people to live far from city centres.	Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa), and Congress of SA Trade Unions (Cosatu) successfully protested in the streets and courts to protect the vast majority of Gauteng road users who boycotted gantries and e-toll bill payment (2010-19).
ultra-commodification of everything, using advanced financial technology	The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and CPS Net1’s strategy of ‘financial inclusion’ included raiding millions of poor people’s monthly social grants – so as to debit for microfinance, cellphone and other undesired ‘services’	Society, disgusted by revelations of abuse collected by Black Sash and its lawyers, acted on behalf of 17 million monthly victims, compelling the state to make the SA Post Office distributor of grants (resulting in massive losses for CPS Net1) (2013-18).
danger of excessively job-killing robotics	Major banks – catalysed by Nedbank – launched automation to replace thousands of workers with hundreds of robots	SA Society of Banking Officials (Sasbo) protested the jobs massacre, but so far unsuccessfully (2018-19).
danger of excessive technological control through robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI)	The leading South African expert, Elon Musk, warns, ‘AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization… the danger of AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads.’	Musk’s consciousness-raising includes a film (Do You Trust This Computer?), regular public statements as well as a twar with Mark Zuckerberg, calling for greater protective regulation against AI abuses (2017-19).
danger of geo-engineering and nanotechnology especially applied to the climate crisis	South Africa has been a pilot site for extreme levels of GMO agriculture and zany climate strategies (such as Carbon Capture and Storage, and dropping iron filings into the ocean to create algae blooms)	Biowatch monitors genetic engineering, while Earthlife Africa, groundWork and progressive environmentalists oppose ‘false solutions’ to climate chaos, while demanding mass replacement of coal and nuclear power with renewables
danger of blockchain and crypto-currency distortion of state monetary sovereignty	One poll (by Hootsuite, in February 2019) found 10.7% of SA internet users invest in Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, the highest rate in the world (the global average is 5.5%); the three crypto exchanges are Luno, Altcoin Trader and OVEX	Cosatu and the National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) regularly advocate much stronger exchange controls, especially against the Illicit Financial Flows that are amplified by crypto-currencies
pro-4IR corporate control of mass media	Independent newspapers engaged in relentless 4IR propaganda (without any hint of its adverse effects), especially as Iqbal Survé pushed his failing ‘Sagarmatha unicorn’ and Ayo tech businesses, while serving as 2018 head of the BRICS Business Council until the Council was fired in October 2018	#Right2Know organisation and academics (e.g. Jane Duncan and Mike Kwet) remain vigilant about corporate media power (2012-19), and various competing media organisations blew the whistle on the Public Investment Commission’s subsidisation of Ayo and the Independent group.

***

We Demand Policy Space for Digital Industrialization and the Ability to Use Data for the Public Interest

Now, the largest corporations are seeking to use the WTO to rewrite the rules to legally entrench their monopolistic practices through access to and control of the world’s most valuable resource, data, forever. But data must not be controlled by private corporations for private profit maximization. Instead, many people and governments are starting to realize the need for national and community ownership of data, and data sovereignty. All countries and communities should have the right to use their data, as well as technology and digitalization generally, to foment industrialization, decent jobs, and for the general public interest, such as improving access to quality public services. In addition, corporations are seeking to use digital trade negotiations to consolidate their damaging business model of avoiding regulation, exploiting labor, evading the payment of taxes (both corporate taxes and trade taxes or tariffs) and demonstrating a total lack of accountability to the communities from which they profit. Appropriate, democratic, and participatory internet governance, and rights to privacy, people’s economic rights to their data, and data protection, must not be subsumed to private commercial interests. Current negotiations towards an agreement on digital trade go far beyond e-commerce and would jeopardize our privacy and people’s economic rights to their data; exacerbate inequalities including through the digital divide; promote tax avoidance by digital corporations; decimate micro-, small-, and medium enterprises (MSMEs); cement monopolistic control of first-movers; make us less safe by proscribing appropriate oversight over source codes and algorithms; and forever abrogate policy space for digital industrialization. Negotiators are claiming alleged benefits to women entrepreneurs and MSMEs while the actual negotiations include provisions that would be extremely harmful to the vast majority of women and small businesses. We demand that:

• Plurilateral and multilateral (as well as bilateral) negotiations towards a binding agreement on digital trade (“e-commerce”) must be halted.
• The appropriation of “women’s empowerment” and MSMEs in the name of promoting digital trade rules must be abandoned.
• Governments should agree outside the WTO a global high-quality standard for personal data protection, national and community ownership over their data, as well as enforceable principles for the use of data, artificial intelligence and machine learning in ways that are ethical and promote equity and social justice.
• Efforts to enforce new obligations on members through accepting the “technological neutrality” equivalence of services commitments through new technologies must be stopped.
• New pro-competition policies must be agreed and enforced, in a venue outside of the WTO.
• Current rules, including in the WTO, which facilitate tax avoidance, tax evasion, and other illicit financial flows, particularly by digital corporations, must be altered to ensure that countries have an appropriate fiscal base to fund the achievement of the SDGs.
• In addition, any current WTO constraints on policy space for digital industrialization, the use of data for the public good, and the achievement of the SDGs on access to information and communications technology, including industrial diversification and value addition – such as limits in performance requirements such as technology transfer, hiring of local workers and managers, use of local inputs – should be removed.

***

MIT

12 June 2022

Marseille’s battle against the surveillance state

https://www.technologyreview.com/?p=1053650&preview=true&truid=d7ed030028dbf5b2ff8b24c308d2a658&mc_cid=b7e5e648ec&mc_eid=ae281c857f

It’s often suggested these cameras work to deter crime. Studies are inconclusive on this point. There does seem to be an effect on closed public spaces like parking garages and subways, but in some cases crime seems to be merely displaced, increasing in areas with fewer cameras.

In general, city surveillance prioritizes the capture of a certain class of criminal, says Picaud—those that commit crimes in public, even if their infractions are often minor. “One can see the overinvestment in these devices which target public space rather than other technologies which could target other crimes instead—like, for example, anything to do with tax evasion,” she says.

Not long after the 2020 elections, the new mayor of Marseille called for an audit of video surveillance in the city. The council is still sitting on the study, which was delivered in October, but preliminary findings were published in the local newspaper The Provence. There are 42 dedicated agents; at any given time, fewer than five are on duty, and each is responsible for 35 screens. The system is not cheap; the newspaper highlighted the cost of installing each camera (over €20,000 per device), renting the optical fiber (€6.5 million a year), and maintaining the cameras, including cleaning and replacing bulbs (€2.8 million a year). Many of the images are not of good enough quality to use. And 272 cameras—over 15% of the total—are rarely consulted. 

“It’s techno-solutionism. There’s a political problem, and they promise to find a technology—an app—to bring it under control,” says Tréguer. “It is very expensive, and it uses a chunk of taxpayers’ money to implement solutions that are dangerous for freedoms, increase control, and are in part ineffective.” 

The situation in Marseille doesn’t seem to be unusual. In February, for example, the Cour de Comptes, an administrative body that audits public finances, highlighted similar issues, in a report on the video surveillance network in Paris. The auditors called its financing “unsuitable and expensive” and charged that no one had evaluated the cameras’ impact on crime.

Marseille’s government does seem to have cooled on the idea of video surveillance. The Big Data of Public Tranquillity Project, whose test period ran from 2018 to 2020, had been the pet scheme of the previous, right-wing mayor. The coalition of socialists, ecologists, and activists that rose to power in the 2020 city elections promised to pause video surveillance. This has been more difficult than initially anticipated, says Hugon, because of the difficulty of terminating contracts early. 

At the same time, city officials have expressed some interest in making the system more efficient. Artificial intelligence is perhaps the only way of doing this on a large scale without adding significantly more personnel. Tréguer does not look forward to this possibility as technology becomes more advanced: “We are re-creating in some way a tentacular, bureaucratic police state without having to recruit dozens or hundreds of people.”

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The available technology is advancing quickly. The French startup Two-i, for example, offers an investigation function, which allows a surveillance team to use AI to search images for specific objects, like a man wearing a backpack or even sport shoes.

“A certain shouty part of the press is waging a battle, and they write false things to frighten people.”

Guillaume Cazenave

Press articles have alleged that the company has deployed face recognition in the city of Metz and was trialing it to read people’s expressions on Nice’s trams. Two-i cofounder Guillaume Cazenave says such reports are inaccurate. “In France, a certain shouty part of the press is waging a battle, and they write false things to frighten people,” he says. 

But there are signs that lawmakers and public bodies in France are looking at ways to facilitate the use of artificial intelligence in the surveillance of public spaces. A parliamentary paper in 2019 advocated establishing a framework for testing facial recognition, which is currently illegal. In the Paris Metro system in 2020, security cameras were AI-enabled to monitor whether passengers were wearing face masks (the technology is not meant to identity those not wearing masks but simply to provide anonymous statistics). The European Union is working on a set of laws called the AI Act that could limit the application of AI surveillance technology. But Technopolice suspects it could create loopholes if it does not ban the use of facial recognition outright.

GABRIELLE VOINOT

It is CNIL, France’s data protection agency, that is tasked with ensuring that surveillance technology complies with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. In 2017, for example, the town of Valenciennes accepted 240 cameras equipped with facial recognition technology from the Chinese company Huawei. The town insisted that the technology was not being used. Nevertheless, CNIL gave the local authorities a warning in 2021, and the project was quietly disbanded. But earlier this year CNIL launched a public consultation on the use of smart cameras in public places in order to clarify the legal framework for their use. Members of Technopolice see this move as a tacit acceptance of the need for such cameras. 

The fight still continues for Technopolice. In the summer, they are planning to set up a series of meetings in the northern towns of Roubaix and Calais; the latter’s council is considering devoting an extra half-million euros to video surveillance. La Quadrature du Net is working on a class action lawsuit against the government for the use of smart cameras in contravention of European law. In Marseille, the group continues working to drum up support; this summer there will be a conference and documentary screenings. There will also be more freedom of information requests to the Marseille council. Five of them, made in the last 12 months, are still pending. Meanwhile, the cameras roll on.

Fleur Macdonald is a writer based near Avignon, France.

Smart cities

rt city is trying to fight the growing ubiquity of policing cameras.

Gabrielle Voinot

by

• Fleur Macdonald archive page

June 13, 2022

Heading toward Marseille’s central train station, Eda Nano points out what looks like a streetlamp on the Rue des Abeilles. Its long stand curves upward to a white dome shading a dark bulb. But this sleek piece of urban furniture is not a lamp. It’s a video camera, with a 360-degree view of the narrow street. 

Nano, a 39-year-old developer, wants to make residents of Marseille more aware that they are being watched. She is part of a group called Technopolice that has been organizing efforts to map the rise of video surveillance. With some 1,600 cameras in the city, there is plenty to find. Mixed in among them, Nano says, are 50 smart cameras designed to detect and flag up suspicious behavior, though she is unsure where they are or how they are being used.

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Across the world, video cameras have become an accepted feature of urban life. Many cities in China now have dense networks of them. London and New Delhi aren’t far behind. 

Now France is playing catch-up. Since 2015, the year of the Bataclan terrorist attacks, the number of cameras in Paris has increased fourfold. The police have used such cameras to enforce pandemic lockdown measures and monitor protests like those of the Gilets Jaunes. And a new nationwide security law, adopted last year, allows for video surveillance by police drones during events like protests and marches.

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For Nano the creep of increased surveillance has personal resonance. She grew up in Albania as it lurched between different political regimes in the 1990s. Her father, a politician, opposed the party that was in power for part of that time. “It was a very difficult period for us, because we were all being watched,” she says. Her family suspected that the authorities had installed bugs in the walls of their home. But even in France, freedoms are fragile. “These past five years France has lived for much of the time in a state of emergency,” she says. “I’ve seen more and more constraints put on our liberty.”

Concerns have been raised throughout the country. But the surveillance rollout has met special resistance in Marseille, France’s second-biggest city. The boisterous, rebellious Mediterranean town sits on some of the fault lines that run through modern France. Known for hip bars, artist studios, and startup hubs, it is also notorious for drugs, poverty, and criminal activity. It has one of the most ethnically diverse populations in Europe but is stranded in Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, a region that leans far right. The city pushes back. Its attitude could be summed up by graffiti you might pass as you drive in on the A7 motorway: “La vie est (re)belle.”

That all makes Marseille a curious testing ground for surveillance tech. When President Emmanuel Macron visited the city in September 2021, he announced that 500 more security cameras would be given to the city council. They would be placed in an area of the city that is home to high numbers of immigrants and has become synonymous with violence and gang activity. He struck a law-and-order tone: “If we can’t succeed in Marseille, we can’t make a success out of France.”

The announcement was just the latest in a string of developments in Marseille that show an increased reliance on cameras in public spaces. 

Activists are fighting back, highlighting the existing surveillance system’s overreach and underperformance. Their message seems to resonate. In 2020, the city elected a new administration, one that had pledged a moratorium on video surveillance devices. But have the residents of Marseille succeeded, or are they simply fighting a rising tide?

Technopolice, a campaign and activist network launched by the digital rights advocacy group La Quadrature du Net in collaboration with other groups, got its start in 2019. Félix Tréguer, an associate researcher at the CNRS Center for Internet and Society, was one of those behind the campaign. He had been seeing increasing numbers of articles in the French media about new surveillance projects and was shocked at how uncritical they were. “[One] simply rehashed the press release from the Marseille council,” he says.

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What spurred him into action was an article in Le Monde in 2017 announcing the Big Data of Public Tranquillity Project, funded by a €1.5 million investment from the European Union, the city of Marseille, and the Bouches-du-Rhône region. It would crunch data from local police, firefighters, hospitals, and video cameras, using artificial intelligence in an attempt to better understand and predict security risks. 

There was little focus in the Le Monde article on privacy protection, the possibility of data breaches, or the risk of bias—a special concern given Marseille’s considerable North African population. Tréguer wrote to the newspaper, and the article was subsequently amended. But he became convinced that what was happening in Marseille was symptomatic of a wider phenomenon. “Many of these projects were starting to be implemented on a local level,” he says. “No one in civil society really realized—even those belonging to activist circles and those who defended the right to privacy.”

In February 2019, La Quadrature du Net and the League of Human Rights successfully fought a plan to roll out facial recognition to monitor entries and exits in two high schools, one in Marseille and another in Nice. Technopolice launched the same year, with the aim of documenting and resisting the spread across France of “safe city” projects, a bit of (often corporate) branding that is used to describe efforts to use data, AI, and surveillance to reduce crime. 

In Marseille, Technopolice built a live map on which volunteers can mark the locations of cameras. The group also began tracking surveillance projects in various cities that use artificial intelligence. There is now a Technopolice group in Montpellier and one in Belgium, and there will soon be one in Paris. Volunteers find and scrutinize records of surveillance initiatives in press releases, newspaper reports, and trade publications. The aim is to form “a record of these projects, which are very opaque,” says Tréguer. “There is really a problem of democratic transparency.”

The group thinks its activism has helped increase awareness of the issue. In 2019, it publicized and campaigned with a local group against plans in Sainte-Étienne, a town near Lyon, for AI-assisted microphones that would detect suspicious sounds in the town center. These plans were eventually abandoned. And winning candidates in the 2020 local elections in Marseille ran on a platform that included putting a moratorium on video surveillance and establishing “citizens councils” to evaluate policing practices. But the team has had little luck getting to the bottom of the Big Data of Public Tranquillity Project despite numerous freedom of information requests. The description of the project on the council’s website remains in the future tense—almost as if it had never been launched. Meanwhile, the number of surveillance cameras in the city has increased to the current 1,600-plus from just under 900 in 2016. As for the smart cameras, they are still scattered around Marseille even though, according to local councilor Christophe Hugon, they were used only in tests and have now been disabled. Despite repeated efforts, the Marseille council did not answer questions posed via telephone and email.

Jean-Jaurès Square in Marseille is a new model of ubiquitous surveillance. The once grotty square reopened last year after more than two years of redevelopment work. It now has seating areas and a playground. Trees have been geometrically arranged. And more than 20 cameras preside over the open-plan design.

“They can see into almost all the areas of the square, because visibility is part of the design,” says Myrtille Picaud, a researcher on cities and surveillance at Sciences-Po, who is based in Marseille. 

The cameras, however discreet, are troubling to some. “It is infantilizing,” says one longtime resident, likening the system to watch towers around a prison. But the inmates of this panopticon don’t necessarily play along. When night falls, it can get so rowdy some cafés close their outdoor spaces. Anticapitalist, feminist, antiracist, or simply funny graffiti covers the pavement. During the wild Festival de la Plaine, which was held illegally in spite of covid restrictions this year, spray paint cans were mounted on poles and used to coat camera lenses. 

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No official statistics have been made public about the impact that Marseille’s cameras have had on crime. But there is reason to suspect it is not as much as officials might like. When the sociologist Laurent Mucchielli looked at the effect of video surveillance on an anonymous port city that bears telling similarities to Marseille, he found that in 2015 cameras were useful in the investigation of 2.2% of crimes where image searches had been requested. Other studies seem to back these kinds of figures; in 2020, a study by the research body attached to the French college of policing also estimated that just 1% of crimes were solved with the help of video images. 

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On 3/8/2021 6:18 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:

South African regulator says WhatsApp cannot share users’ information

• The Mercury
• 5 Mar 2021
• | Reuters

FACEBOOK Inc cannot share any contact information it collects from WhatsApp users in South Africa with its other companies without first obtaining authorisation from the country’s Information Regulator (IR), the agency said.

In January, the Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp informed users it was preparing a new privacy policy, under which it could share some data, including location and phone numbers, with Facebook and its other units such as Instagram and Messenger.

The move sparked a backlash among users in South Africa and elsewhere, and prompted many to opt for rival services such as Signal or Telegram.

“WhatsApp cannot without obtaining prior authorisation from the IR process any contact information of its users for a purpose other than the one for which the number was specifically intended at collection, with the aim of linking that information jointly with information processed by other Facebook companies,” the regulator said.

The regulator said its decision was in accordance with section 57 of the Protection of Personal Information Act, South Africa’s data protection law.

The agency also said that it has written to Facebook South Africa and outlined its concerns about the company's privacy policy. A WhatsApp spokesperson said the company is reviewing the regulator's letter.

***

What's popular on Facebook? Extreme far right political views and lies, study says

Jessica Guynn

USA TODAY

What’s popular on Facebook? Far-right news and information. 

What’s even more popular? Far-right falsehoods.

Those are the findings of a new study out Wednesday from New York University.

Sources of news and information on the far right generate the highest average number of interactions per follower, more than any other partisan group on Facebook, even extreme views on the political left, NYU’s Cybersecurity for Democracy project reported.

"We found that politically extreme sources tend to generate more interactions from users. In particular, content from sources rated as far-right by independent news rating services consistently received the highest engagement per follower of any partisan group," the study said.

Far-right sources of news and information that spread misinformation have even higher engagement than far-right sources overall, generating on average 65% more engagement per follower, according to the study.

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Misinformation that appeals to our emotions has been a boon for fraudsters looking to profit off falsehoods or gain a political advantage. But while sources of information elsewhere on the political spectrum frequently suffer a “misinformation penalty” – a measurable decline in engagement for being unreliable – “being a consistent spreader of far-right misinformation appears to confer a significant advantage,” the report found.

Facebook says the NYU study mostly examines how people engage with certain types of content, not how many people actually see it on the platform.

"When you look at the content that gets the most reach across Facebook, it's not at all as partisan as this study suggests," the company said in a statement.

But the report echoes findings from other researchers that far-right content resonates with Facebook users, in large part because it elicits strong reactions.

An analysis of millions of social media posts by Politico and the nonpartisan think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that right-wing social media influencers, media outlets and some GOP supporters drove the online conversation about the Black Lives Matter movement and voter fraud, two of the most heated election issues.

“There is evidence that content from highly conservative news sites is favored by Facebook algorithms,” Steven Johnson, an information technology professor at the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce told USA TODAY in November. 

Right-wing personalities have a distinct advantage on the platform, not because the algorithms favor conservatives but because they connect with people on a visceral level, Facebook said in September.

“Right-wing populism is always more engaging," a Facebook executive told Politico when asked why conservative commentators Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro drive such high engagement.

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The executive said the content speaks to "an incredibly strong, primitive emotion" by touching on such topics as "nation, protection, the other, anger, fear."

The top five news and information sources included in the NYU study were Dan Bongino, Newsmax, Breitbart, TruthFeed and Trending Politics. NewsGuard and Media Bias/Fact Check determined the partisan nature of the sources.

Engagement with posts from far-right and far-left news sources peaked around Election Day and again on Jan. 6 when a mob of supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, the report found.

***

https://www.inc.com/technology

Tim Cook May Have Just Ended Facebook

Looks like it's no more Mr. Nice Guy.

By Justin Bariso@JustinJBariso

What happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object? 

In a recent speech in Brussels marking International Data Privacy Day, Apple CEO Tim Cook went on the offensive against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Cook's speech seems to be a direct response to Facebook's recent attack on Apple, in which the world's largest social network took out full-page ads in several newspapers attacking Apple's new privacy changes. 

But what's most fascinating is that Cook took direct aim at Facebook without ever mentioning the company by name. 

Just check out the following excerpt:

"Technology does not need vast troves of personal data stitched together across dozens of websites and apps in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it, and we're here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom.

"If a business is built on misleading users on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform.

"We should not look away from the bigger picture. In a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement, the longer the better, and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible.

"Too many are still asking the question 'How much can we get away with?' when they need to be asking 'What are the consequences?'

"What are the consequences of prioritizing conspiracy theories and violent incitement simply because of the high rates of engagement?

"What are the consequences of not just tolerating but rewarding content that undermines public trust in life-saving vaccinations?

"What are the consequences of seeing thousands of users joining extremist groups and then perpetuating an algorithm that recommends even more?

"It is long past time to stop pretending that this approach doesn't come with a cost. A polarization of lost trust, and yes, of violence.

"A social dilemma cannot be allowed to become a social catastrophe."

The fact that Cook doesn't name Facebook somehow increases its impact. Because as you hear Cook's 's speech, you can't help but immediately think of the house that Zuckerberg built.

If you're wondering how Apple and Facebook ended up at odds, you can read more of the details here. But the reality is these two tech giants have been heading toward a major conflict for quite some time. 

The problem is that Apple's and Facebook's business philosophies are diametrically opposed to each other. 

Apple is a lifestyle brand. And part of the lifestyle Apple sells is users having more control over their privacy.

Facebook, on the other hand, is in the data business. The more data it collects on users, the more effectively it can sell targeted ads. 

But collecting and selling all that data comes at great cost, as Cook highlights. "The end result of all of this is that you are no longer the customer," said Cook. "You are the product."

Cook went on to further highlight the differences in Apple's and Facebook's philosophies, in no uncertain terms.

"We believe that ethical technology is technology that works for you," said Cook. "It's technology that helps you sleep, not keeps you up. It tells you when you've had enough. It gives you space to create or draw or write or learn, not refresh just one more time."

At first glimpse, it might appear that Apple and Facebook are on diverging paths. But in reality, they're on a collision course. 

So, what does happen when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object? 

One of them gets destroyed.

The takeaway

There are major lessons here for entrepreneurs and business owners. 

As Cook aptly points out, "advertising existed and thrived for decades" without using data that was collected in less than transparent ways. And as customers are offered more choice when it comes to how apps and websites track their data, experts predict that more and more people will opt out of said tracking. 

If you're an advertiser, you'll need to adapt. Or die.

But there's also a bigger lesson at stake. 

Now is the time to ask yourself: Which philosophy do I want to pursue? Do I want a business that serves my customers? Or one that takes advantage of customers to serve my business?

Because in the end, only one of these philosophies is sustainable for the long-term. The other will lead you to crash and burn.

And while the long-term solution may initially prove more challenging, remember:

"The path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom."

***

Google moves away from diet of 'cookies' to track users

Google moves away from diet of 'cookies' to track users

Google says it has made progress toward a new system allowing the delivery of targeted advertising without the use of privacy-invading "cookies"

Glenn CHAPMAN

Sun, February 7, 2021, 6:13 AM

Google is weaning itself off user-tracking "cookies" which allow the web giant to deliver personalized ads but which also have raised the hackles of privacy defenders.

Last month, Google unveiled the results of tests showing an alternative to the longstanding tracking practice, claiming it could improve online privacy while still enabling advertisers to serve up relevant messages.

"This approach effectively hides individuals 'in the crowd' and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser," Google product manager Chetna Bindra explained in unveiling the system called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).

"Results indicate that when it comes to generating interest-based audiences, FLoC can provide an effective replacement signal for third-party cookies."

Google plans to begin testing the FLoC approach with advertisers later this year with its Chrome browser.

"Advertising is essential to keeping the web open for everyone, but the web ecosystem is at risk if privacy practices do not keep up with changing expectations," Bindra added.

Google has plenty of incentive for the change. The US internet giant has been hammered by critics over user privacy, and is keenly aware of trends for legislation protecting people's data rights.

Growing fear of cookie-tracking has prompted support for internet rights legislation such as GDPR in Europe and has the internet giant devising a way to effectively target ads without knowing too much about any individual person.

- 'Privacy nightmare' -

Some kinds of cookies -- which are text files stored when a user visits a website -- are a convenience for logins and browsing at frequently visited sites.

Anyone who has pulled up a registration page online only to have their name and address automatically entered where required has cookies to thank. But other kinds of cookies are seen by some as nefarious.

"Third-party cookies are a privacy nightmare," Electronic Frontier Foundation staff technologist Bennet Cyphers told AFP.

"You don't need to know what everyone has ever done just to serve them an ad."

He reasoned that advertising based on context can be effective; an example being someone looking at recipes at a cooking website being shown ads for cookware or grocery stores.

Safari and Firefox browsers have already done away with third-party cookies, but they are still used at the world's most popular browser - Chrome.

Chrome accounted for 63 percent of the global browser market last year, according to StatCounter.

"It's both a competitive and legal liability for Google to keep using third-party cookies, but they want their ad business to keep humming," Cyphers said.

Cyphers and others have worries about Google using a secret formula to lump internet users into groups and give them "cohort" badges of sorts that will be used to target marketing messages without knowing exactly who they are.

"There is a chance that it just makes a lot of privacy problems worse," Cyphers said, suggesting the new system could create "cohort" badges of people who may be targeted with little transparency..

"There is a machine learning black box that is going to take in every bit of everything you have even done in your browser and spit out a label that says you are this kind of person," Cyphers said.

"Advertisers are going to decode what those labels mean."

He expected advertisers to eventually deduce which labels include certain ages, genders or races, and which are people prone to extreme political views.

A Marketers for an Open Web business coalition is campaigning against Google's cohort move, questioning its effectiveness and arguing it will force more advertisers into its "walled garden."

"Google’s proposals are bad for independent media owners, bad for independent advertising technology and bad for marketers," coalition director James Rosewell said in a release.

***

Cyberhate

Extremism, Terrorism & Bigotry

Race & Racial Justice

ADL, NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Common Sense, Free Press and Color of Change Call for Global Corporations to Pause Advertising on Facebook to Stop Hate Online

As Facebook has fueled the spread of hate online, a new campaign, #StopHateforProfit, organizes global corporations standing in solidarity against such hate

New York, NY, June 17, 2020 … In response to Facebook’s repeated failure to meaningfully address the vast proliferation of hate on its platforms, six organizations today announced a new campaign, #StopHateforProfit, that asks large Facebook advertisers to show they will not support a company that puts profit over safety. ADL (the Anti-Defamation League), the NAACP, Sleeping Giants, Color Of Change, Free Press and Common Sense have created a coalition of the nation’s most storied civil rights organizations calling for some of the world’s largest corporations to pause advertising on Facebook during the month of July 2020.

The campaign is a response to Facebook’s long history of allowing racist, violent and verifiably false content to run rampant on its platform. The campaign will organize corporate and public pressure to demand Facebook stop generating ad revenue from hateful content, provide more support to people who are targets of racism and hate, and to increase safety for private groups on the platform, among other measures.

The #StopHateforProfit campaign was launched today with an ad in The Los Angeles Times asking what Facebook could do with the $70 billion in revenue that it makes from advertising each year, and highlighting that the social media company is amplifying the messages of white supremacists, permitting incitement to violence, and is failing to disrupt bad actors using the platform to do harm. The ad calls on large corporate advertisers to “send Facebook a powerful message: Your profits will never be worth promoting hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and violence.”

“Facebook remains unwilling to take significant steps to remove political propaganda from its platform,” said Derrick Johnson, President and CEO of the NAACP. “It is clear that Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, are no longer simply negligent, but in fact, complacent in the spread of misinformation, despite the irreversible damage to our democracy. Such actions will upend the integrity of our elections as we head into 2020. We will not stand for this. While we recognize the value that Facebook provides in connecting people of color with one another, we call into question a platform that profits from the suppression of Black votes or Black voices.”

“We have long seen how Facebook has allowed some of the worst elements of society into our homes and our lives. When this hate spreads online it causes tremendous harm and also becomes permissible offline,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL CEO. “Our organizations have tried individually and collectively to push Facebook to make their platforms safer, but they have repeatedly failed to take meaningful action. We hope this campaign finally shows Facebook how much their users and their advertisers want them to make serious changes for the better.”

“We have been continually disappointed and stunned by Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to protecting white supremacy, voter suppression and outright lies on Facebook. As corporations take a stand against racism in our society, they should consider how their advertising dollars support Facebook making Black people less safe online,” said Rashad Robinson, President of Color Of Change. “Facebook’s failure of leadership has actively stoked the racial hatred we see in our country and even profits off its proliferation. A key way for major corporations to demand racial justice is to withhold their dollars until Facebook becomes more responsible and accountable to Black communities on the platform.”

Over the last few years, Facebook has:

• Allowed incitement to violence against protestors fighting for racial justice in America in the wake of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and many others;
• Made Breitbart News a “trusted news source” and made The Daily Caller a “fact checker” despite both publications having records of working with known white nationalists and neo-Nazis;
• Was forced to make changes to their advertising platform after a lawsuit alleged Facebook had allowed for widespread housing discrimination against communities of color;
• Silenced Black users on the platforms for calling out racism and also refused to adequately protect users from online threats;
• Failed to recognize and remove Holocaust denial as a form of hate; and
• Allowed the Facebook platform to be used in widespread voter suppression efforts, using targeted disinformation aimed at Black voters.

“Facebook has become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world by allowing disinformation, hate and incitement on its platform," said James P. Steyer, Founder and CEO of Common Sense. “Facebook has refused to stop prioritizing profits over the well-being of our society, but advertisers can, which is why we are urging companies to take a pause from spending on Facebook ads until it makes common sense changes on the platform that protect our children, our democracy and social justice in this country."

ADL’s 2019 survey of Americans using social media found that Facebook was the platform where most Americans reported experiencing hate and harassment. More than 55 percent of Facebook users reporting experiencing hate and harassment on the platform.

Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest and largest nonpartisan civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities. You can read more about the NAACP’s work and our six “Game Changer” issue areas at naacp.org.

Cyberhate

Extremism, Terrorism & Bigotry

Race & Racial Justice

ADL is the world’s leading anti-hate organization. Founded in 1913 in response to an escalating climate of anti-Semitism and bigotry, its timeless mission is to protect the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment for all. Today, ADL continues to fight all forms of hate with the same vigor and passion. A global leader in exposing extremism, delivering anti-bias education, and fighting hate online, ADL is the first call when acts of anti-Semitism occur. ADL’s ultimate goal is a world in which no group or individual suffers from bias, discrimination or hate.

On 1/23/2021 10:21 AM, Patrick Bond wrote:

(There are fascinating cyberwar updates in this week's media, especially from our local front, the South African info/coms-battleground.

    So many 4IR hucksters here have promised that Public Private Partnerships and new technologies will make life better for all. But the country's legions of 4ICRs - Fourth Industrial CounterRevolutionaries - know better, and are happy to call "BS!" on Public Private Plundering especially when it comes to our own headspace.

    Rarely can we count on state support. So it's refreshing to discover in central Pretoria what seems to be the only SA state agency consistently committed to at least a semblance of economic justice, the Competition Commission and Tribunal, standing up to Mark Zuckerberg's predatory Big Data capitalism. The Tribunal is now demanding that WhatsApp behave at least a little like the public utility we all hoped the internet and social media would become.

Apart from stopping Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, from kicking GovChat off the platform, the tribunal order provides that the two social media companies not do anything to undermine GovChat’s relationship with its clients. At the same time, GovChat may not add any new clients or users to its WhatsApp Business Account. GovChat will also not be able to expand its service offering to its existing clients.  The case casts a shadow on Facebook’s dominance in instant messaging amid sharper scrutiny of the industry’s power over public conversation. Recently, major players such as Facebook and Twitter banned former US president Donald Trump from their platforms, a move that has some questioning the equality of liberal vs conservative voices online. 

    At the heart of the dispute in SA is Facebook’s allegations that GovChat, which was launched in 2018 by listed technology group Capital Appreciation (Capprec) and the department of co-operative governance and traditional affairs, is in violation of its contract terms of use because when it signed up its digital communication programme to the WhatsApp Business app it pledged to use the service to monitor and evaluate service delivery, response time, failures, success and corruption in real time. However, after the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, the government used GovChat to convey awareness messages, symptom-tracking notifications and provision of test results. At a hearing before the tribunal last week, GovChat said Facebook moved to block GovChat on WhatsApp because the social media giant probably sees the government messaging service as a threat. Facebook could be eyeing an opportunity to provide similar services to the government directly.

My vote is that by defending Covid-19 awareness technology, the Competition Tribunal should now be added to South Africa's world-leading 4ICR team, which you can read about here, or check out within the table way way below. It's easy to predict that the 4ICR squad will grow by leaps and bounds, as the struggle continually evolves. It's long overdue to welcome part of the SA state, isn't it.

    And there may be more. Another potential 4ICR cadre embedded deep within the SA state is Pansy Tlakula, who heads the office called IRSA, the Information Regulator South Africa. Although she currently seems very middle-of-the-road - and as they say in Texas, "There ain't nothin' in the middle of the road except yellow lines and dead armadillos" - she speaks the language of a careful regulator, not necessarily a "captive regulator" - as all the rest of the Pretoria bureaucrats aspire to be, in search of a well-lubricated revolving door to capital's inner sanctum.

    I heard her on the radio last week, describing how when WhatsApp bullies us to accept the new data-mining contractual terms or lose our accounts, Zuck is violating the 'voluntary' nature of data surrender required within SA law. So, bland as it sounds, this news is potentially an encouraging step forward:

Tlakula says that “on the face of it”, WhatsApp’s recently updated terms of service and privacy policy “looks problematic. But we don’t want to just jump in. We want a sober analysis of the updated policy.” Tlakula says the IRSA has already contacted Facebook and is analysing the updated policy to see whether it is compliant with the country’s Protection of Personal Information Act.

    And let's add another new row in that table way below, to incorporate another likely entry to the 4ICR team, namely all of us who are thinking of getting the hell out of Zuck's clutches by February 8 and moving to Signal and/or Telegram, which I intend to do this weekend, if I can ever figure out how to download apps properly, a skill that digital natives - my children - must always reteach us 20th-c digital immigrants. As you see in the New Frame report below,

The backlash from South African consumers is also plainly evident. If you had checked the Samsung Play Store in South Africa or the Apple App Store in the days before the policy update you would have found WhatsApp in second place, only trailing the country’s Covid-19 app in the top downloads. Telegram sat in 58th and 64th position on the two app stores, and Signal didn’t even make the top 100. A week later, Telegram is at number one in the charts with Signal just behind it in second place. WhatsApp has dropped from second to fourth and seventh place on the two charts.

Who can dispute, that the South African masses have done really well at contesting i-capital, even imposing on two major 4IR firms a corporate death sentence: the BellPottinger Zupta-misinfo bot factory in 2017 (see the film Influence by Dianna Neille and Richard Poplak), and last year, CashPaymasterServices predatory financiers, thus pinching the dreaded World Bank, which remains the main owner of CPS's holding company Net1. It would be sweet if such struggles interconnected and amped up to the point that the SA state - and all others - might one day not just nationalise but socialise social media platforms so that they become genuine public utilities. We have to think big: I'm looking forward to reading Socialist Register 2021 on this theme, and Cory Doctorow's new online book How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism.

    Meantime, dangers grow of worsening addictions to Big Data's corporate ad-driven coms, which in turn means the character of most inter-capitalist power struggles, such as in Canberra, Australia and Paris, France, is represented by national media corporations begging for mercy - and state support - from international Big Data. The latter's bad habit of stealing journalistic content is now being hotly contested by the Australian and French governments, as you see below.

    Still, the most interesting case of state repression of such Big Tech tomfoolery - which also adversely affected the largest chunk of my own entirely-involuntary pension portfolio, damn it - is Asia's largest company, Tencent, worth $844 bn. Its share value was battered by 20% in 2018 when Beijing bureaucrats nixed Pony Ma's efforts to spread child-poisoning Japanese video games.

    Hence our SA apartheid-era propagandist 'press' leader, Naspers - also now known as 'Prosus', the firm that shifted Naspers' 30% ownership of Tencent to Amsterdam in 2019, following Koos Bekker's lucky 2001 $35 mn bet on Tencent, now worth $253 bn - also shrank by 20% that year, though it's way back up in record fictitious-territory again now. Following whatever crazed cocaine-fuelled logic that stockbrokers do during the last eight pandemic-depression months, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange's capitalisation is at an all-time high, and with economic output falling 8% the last 10 months, the Buffett Indicator - market cap/GDP - for South Africa has in January 2021 reached the 400% level, which is the highest ever recorded for any country's corporate share valuation relative to economic output. (Hong Kong is higher but not when combined with the other Chinese share markets.)

    Indeed all these state-v-capital dances are occurring during a period of extreme financial wilding - what the Guardian just termed "'hysterical' market speculation... an ‘epic’ bubble, amid fears that the flow of stimulus has created a monster" - witnessed mainly as insane stock market gaming fed by trickle-up Quantitative Easing. The tech sector benefiting most from the hype will be even further reupped next week, as the World Economic Forum in virtual-Davos again cranks up the 4IR volume. But the bloated Present Value of future earning estimations is much much worse than just a con stock market casino counter, with tears to follow - i.e., the way the 2000-01 dot.com collapse shrunk shareholders' net worth by $7 trillion. It's also a signal of the tech circuit of capital's utter hubris, and this readily migrates from the financial fantasy world to real life, as Zuckerberg seeks to monetise his $18 bn WhatsApp investment, by looting our once-secret life info.

    In this context, it's quite hard to determine who's really winning. Certainly the wealth of the world's richest man, Elon Musk, is soaring: $170 billion more was found in his wallet in the last four years, during the Trump gogo-tycoon era. But credit is due, as well, to the white-Alpha-Male miseducation Musk received here in Joburg at Bryanston High, broken bones and all. For more, see Andile Zulu's take on Musk in the M&G below.

    After that sort of appalling exposure to Sandton-style macho entrepreneurialism - which in later stages of life, regularly allows our lads to claim gold or silver medals in the PwC biannual rankings of world's most corrupt corporate elites - what else would you expect. In this city of gold, the world's most income-unequal, we are truly the experts in an 1890s-era racist creation and subsequent 21st-century class-reproduction of elite scum. To be sure, Stellenbosch tries to keep up, with Johann Rupert and Marcus Jooste as their poster-boys of malevolent corporate power - and with the Silicon Valley of SA tag deserved on the basis that the winelands now play host to Amazon (South Africa), Thawte, Naspers, Entersekt, PayFast and Snapscan. So class apartheid thrives in pockets, from Sandton to Stellenbosch.

    And yes, as the table below acknowledges, Musk was once actually a genuine 4ICR vanguardist, thanks to his battle with Zuck over the dangers of AI and robotics. However, since I drew up that chart in early 2020, it's become clear we must relegate Musk to a new category - 4ICCR, counter-counter-revo - after his enthusiasm for the 2019 U.S.-assisted Bolivia coup was unveiled. Vijay Prashad and Alejandro Bejarano had already described Musk accurately last March, as "neo-conquistador for South America’s lithium." But he surprised many by being an honest neo-conquistador a few months later, for as Prashad and Bejarano followed up,

On July 24, 2020, Tesla’s Elon Musk wrote on Twitter that a second U.S. “government stimulus package is not in the best interests of the people.” Someone responded to Musk soon after, “You know what wasn’t in the best interest of people? The U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there.” Musk then wrote: "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it."

That's very white-South-African of you there, Elon, carrying to the U.S. the Dutch East India Company Spirit of 1652, as if 1492 nostalgia wasn't strong enough over there. As a fitting rebuttal, the Bolivian Movement for Socialism decisively won back state power in last year's national election. And so Musk's earlier attack on Zuck - and his warning that if you add AI to robotics, stir, and by mistake leave the factory door open, that's the end of humanity - is long forgotten.

    But perhaps - as the late political scientist Leo Panitch had always hoped and advocated - there is some small degree of nation-state room for maneuver within the imperialist system. As The Guardian reports,

Unfortunately for Google, the company has a bad poker face. Even as it was warning Australian senators that it would have to pull out of the country rather than pay the newly levied fee, on the other side of the world in France, Google had agreed to do just that. In an agreement signed between Google France and the industrial body representing the country’s news industry, Google will pay licensing fees to individual news publishers to reuse their material online.

    If you're Rubert Murdoch, then no doubt you're egging on a right-wing Australian government on behalf of nationalistic capitalism, the way the French corporate press must have juiced up Macron to fight Google. But sorry, this seems a bit more like petty intra-4IR rivalry, shifting the deckchairs on the information Titanic.

    We really need to sink that thing, and float a new boat, based on completely different values, such as our right to information, personal-data privacy, universal access to free lifeline-quantity data, full respect for probing journalism that tackles corporate and state power in the way the likes of Assange, Pilger and Amabhungane have taught, and a bottom-up Information Communications Technology regulatory system stressing non-censored, advert-free, reliable information with nutritious commentary... not the current overdose of infotainment drawing on an internecine-"Hate" model of self-destructive media competition.

    As a step in that direction, maybe our South African 4ICR team will in coming weeks do to Covid-vaccine Intellectual Property claims by Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J, etc, what they did to Big Pharma twenty years ago during the WTO struggle that raised life expectancy here from what was then 52 to today's 65: access to decommodified, destratified AIDS medicines provided through our public health service. This battle boiled down to their demands for 'deglobalisation of capital' - insofar as the generic drugs are produced locally - and required all the international solidarity with the Treatment Action Campaign that could be mustered from ACTUP!, Medicins sans Frontier, Oxfam, etc: i.e., the 'globalisation of people.' Breaking IP power would undermine one of the main tenets of the 4IR, and the benefits of that are terribly obvious for all to see, given vaccine nationalism during global health apartheid.

    It's a good formula - decommodify, destratify, supply through public not private institutions, deglobalise capital and globalise people - to follow in the struggles against tech capitalism, too.)

Competition Tribunal orders Facebook to keep GovChat on WhatsApp

The tribunal said the order is because the parties are unable to agree on arrangements among themselves during this interim period

BL PREMIUM

22 January 2021 - 16:36 Mudiwa Gavaza

Picture: BLOOMBERG/BRENT LEWIN

The Competition Tribunal, the body which has the final say on antitrust-related matters in SA, has ordered WhatsApp and Facebook not to remove GovChat from the WhatsApp platform. 

Earlier this month, GovChat — government’s digital communication platform — asked the tribunal to have Facebook interdicted from removing it from the WhatsApp platform that charges a fee to business and government clients for contacting customers or citizens.

On Friday, the Tribunal issued an order that regulates the arrangements between GovChat, WhatsApp and Facebook until a final judgment is made. The tribunal said it issued the order “because the parties were unable to agree on arrangements among themselves during this interim period”.

Apart from stopping Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, from kicking GovChat off the platform, the tribunal order provides that the two social media companies not do anything to undermine GovChat’s relationship with its clients. At the same time, GovChat may not add any new clients or users to its WhatsApp Business Account. GovChat will also not be able to expand its service offering to its existing clients. 

The case casts a shadow on Facebook’s dominance in instant messaging amid sharper scrutiny of the industry’s power over public conversation. Recently, major players such as Facebook and Twitter banned former US president Donald Trump from their platforms, a move that has some questioning the equality of liberal vs conservative voices online. 

At the heart of the dispute in SA is Facebook’s allegations that GovChat, which was launched in 2018 by listed technology group Capital Appreciation (Capprec) and the department of co-operative governance and traditional affairs, is in violation of its contract terms of use because when it signed up its digital communication programme to the WhatsApp Business app it pledged to use the service to monitor and evaluate service delivery, response time, failures, success and corruption in real time.

However, after the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, the government used GovChat to convey awareness messages, symptom-tracking notifications and provision of test results.  

At a hearing before the tribunal last week, GovChat said Facebook moved to block GovChat on WhatsApp because the social media giant probably sees the government messaging service as a threat. Facebook could be eyeing an opportunity to provide similar services to the government directly.

GovChat is an affiliate of Capprec, funded through its Enterprise Development Fund. Capprec’s subsidiary Synthesis Software Technologies is involved in the design and development of the GovChat platform.  

gav...@businesslive.co.za

***

https://theafricanmirror.africa/science-tech-and-innovation/whatsapp-has-been-mining-your-data-all-along/

New Frame

WhatsApp has been mining your data all along

January 22, 2021 The African Mirror

GLOBAL messaging application WhatsApp made headlines when it released a controversial privacy policy update that triggered an exodus of users to rival messaging platforms.

The update to WhatsApp’s terms of service and privacy policy informed users that they would have to agree to the new policy by 8 February 2021 to continue using the service. WhatsApp planned to share its users’ data with parent company Facebook, fuelling widespread outrage. 

While many users assumed this meant Facebook wanted access to their personal messages with friends, colleagues and family members, this is not the data Facebook is after. What it wants to share is something called metadata.

Metadata can include your phone type and model, the operating system it uses, your battery or signal strengths, what mobile network you subscribe to, what language you speak, as well as your location and contact list. It can also include data such as how many times a week you message a particular person or how many times a day you are actively engaged on WhatsApp.

Many users, it seems, were unaware that Facebook and WhatsApp had actually begun the process of sharing data back in September 2016. Any user who joined WhatsApp after the end of September 2016 has already had their data shared with Facebook and those who joined before that date would only be exempt from the data sharing if they had ticked an opt-out box available for only 30 days.

“I feel that people are losing their heads over something that has always been the case,” says Natasha Msonza, an information technology security expert. Msonza says what is important about the new policy update is that it establishes the terms governing the use of metadata, which enable Facebook to sell more targeted adverts. 

“The updated terms simply ask us to consent to this although they have already been doing it,” she says. “It puts the company in the clear legally.”

Protecting personal information

Pansy Tlakula, the chair of the Information Regulator South Africa (IRSA), says that “on the face of it”, WhatsApp’s recently updated terms of service and privacy policy “looks problematic”. 

“But we don’t want to just jump in,” she says. “We want a sober analysis of the updated policy.” 

Tlakula says the IRSA has already contacted Facebook and is analysing the updated policy to see whether it is compliant with the country’s Protection of Personal Information Act (Popi). The act was approved by Parliament in 2013 and has been promulgated in various stages between 2014 and 2019.

Tlakula says Popi, which aims to protect South African citizens’ privacy, was modelled on the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which exempts European citizens from the updated WhatsApp policy. Tlakula says that if the GDPR exempts Europeans then Popi should exempt South Africans.

“One of the things we want to look at is the metadata that WhatsApp wants to collect,” she says.

While South Africa’s Competition Commission had no comment when asked about the WhatsApp policy update, the response from the Turkish government has been swift. Five days after WhatsApp updated its terms of service, the Turkish Competition Board announced it had launched an investigation into WhatsApp and Facebook.

The board said the two companies should suspend their data collection until the probe is complete.

When Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014 it told the European Union’s antitrust authorities during its review of the merger that the two companies would remain separate products. It insisted it was technically impossible to combine WhatsApp data with its other services.

But in 2016, Facebook released an update that raised the possibility of linking accounts from both platforms, which resulted in a $122 million fine by the European Commission in 2017 for providing “incorrect” and “misleading” information to the authorities during the 2014 review. Facebook said the information it provided to the commission had been, to its knowledge, correct at the time.

It has been suggested in a number of media reports that the integration of WhatsApp and Facebook played a role in the departure of WhatsApp founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum from Facebook in 2017 and 2018 respectively. Acton launched the Signal Foundation in 2018, the non-profit behind messaging app Signal.

Boost for Signal and Telegram

What Facebook’s intentions for WhatsApp were in 2014 are now irrelevant. The new policy update makes it clear that Facebook intends increasingly to integrate the two companies.

A WhatsApp account and a Facebook account may have once been two separate entities, but that is changing. As The Guardian’s technology editor Alex Hern recently argued, “If you’re a WhatsApp user, you’re a Facebook customer.”

Before the policy update, WhatsApp had 2 billion users. Rival messaging service Telegram had 400 million users and Signal sat on 200 million, a mere 20% and 10% respectively of WhatsApp’s base.

But the backlash against WhatsApp’s policy update has been severe. Compared to the previous week, Signal saw a whopping 4 200% increase in new users with 7.5 million downloads between 6 and 10 January, while Telegram saw a 91% increase with 9 million downloads in the same period.

Prominent businesspeople from around the world have urged consumers to switch to the other messaging services. Indian businessman Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the chief executive of Paytm, tweeted that WhatsApp and Facebook were “abusing their monopoly” and taking “users’ privacy for granted”, while Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey both spoke out against the WhatsApp privacy update.

The backlash from South African consumers is also plainly evident. If you had checked the Samsung Play Store in South Africa or the Apple App Store in the days before the policy update you would have found WhatsApp in second place, only trailing the country’s Covid-19 app in the top downloads. Telegram sat in 58th and 64th position on the two app stores, and Signal didn’t even make the top 100.

A week later, Telegram is at number one in the charts with Signal just behind it in second place. WhatsApp has dropped from second to fourth and seventh place on the two charts.

Msonza says that although WhatsApp’s messaging system is encrypted, there is really no way of knowing if there are any backdoors that enable the company to collect more than just metadata.

“On this basis alone, it may be wise for privacy-conscious people to use different, perhaps open-source platforms, especially for communicating sensitive information,” she says. “The struggle may be in getting loved ones, especially the elderly, to move along.”

***

Mail&Guardian

No one should be as rich as Elon Musk

Andile Zulu

20 Jan 2021

(Graphic: John McCann/M&G)

The reactions to Elon Musk’s billionaire status are evidence that far too many South Africans have not fully grasped the destructive consequences of inequality.

Entrepreneur Musk was recently crowned the richest man in the world. The founder and chief of Tesla Motors sits on a total net worth of $195-billion. The rapid swelling of Musk’s wealth was celebrated by many South Africans across social media and in our national publications. His ascension from the supposedly “modest” suburbs of Pretoria into the venerated world of the ultra-rich stands to some as a testimony to the value of ingenuity, tireless work and the rewarding nature of capitalism. 

Others drew inspiration from Musk’s success, proud that a “shithole” country had played a part in producing a brilliant entrepreneur. The dreams of prosperity that figures like Musk inspire are to be expected. The mega-rich are not held down by unending debt, costly bills and unsatisfying, poorly paying jobs. They possess a level of freedom that many of us dearly wish we could have.

Absent from the revelry were urgent, critical questions about how such wealth is amassed and at what expense. Thirty million South Africans live in poverty; that means 30-million people earn less than R1 183 a month. About 11-million South Africans of working age are unemployed and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

At the forefront of my mind was this: Amid mass poverty and precarity, why do we tolerate and even eagerly rejoice in excessive wealth? Is this contrast — of billions destitute and a few ridiculously rich — not morally absurd?

The ballooning of the billionaire class is not cause for celebration. The empires of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, alongside the prosperity of Patrice Motsepe and the Oppenheimer family, are signs of an authoritarian impulse in neoliberal capitalism. A critique of the mega-rich is not veiled jealousy or a condemnation of individuals. It is a defence of democracy and an unmasking of power.

Legal entitlement

The power of billionaires rests on their legal entitlement to privately own the means of producing wealth. The modern nation state is not a neutral actor in this issue. With legislation, private property is sanctified. Through government policies, an environment that embraces free enterprise can be curated, therefore extracting the most of one’s ownership — privatising social goods and deregulating industries. Having a legitimate monopoly on violence, police and, in some instances, the military, functions to enforce unwavering respect of private property.

The practice of private property, by definition, excludes others.

Vital resources on which we all depend for survival are mostly owned by an unelected, unaccountable minority. A consequence is that how resources are allocated and used is mostly decided on the basis of what will yield profit and not the basic needs of a society. What should be questioned is whether such an arrangement is just and/or efficient? The answer is no to both criteria.

The supremacy of the super rich is in part sustained by intoxicating ideologies. One piece of such ideology is the myth of the self-made billionaire or multimillionaire.

Although inheritance does contribute to the reproduction of exorbitant wealth, what needs more acknowledgment is that producing wealth is a collective endeavour. Motsepe cannot sustain his enterprise without the arduous labour of mineworkers, nor can Johann Rupert amass millions without the toil of workers who make, transport and sell his luxury goods. Yet it is these workers who are locked into poverty or insecure employment.

Seductive argument

An objection to this may be the notion that billionaires are often incredible innovators who deserve to reap the rewards of their genius. Seductive as this argument may be, it’s also a frequently peddled distortion. Since the early 20th century, many major scientific and technological breakthroughs were a collective endeavour, often funded by the state. More importantly, the brilliance of billionaires is not to be found in their intellect, but in their abilities to monetise the innovations of others.

French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon perfectly captures the fact of collective labour: “There is not a man then who does not live off the products of several thousand industries; not a labourer who does not receive from society at large the things which he consumes.” If labour is a collective effort, then there should be a collective benefit to all those who contribute, but this isn’t the reality of our economic system.

Those indispensable to producing the essential goods and services we need receive the least compensation for their labour in comparison to those who merely own the mechanisms for wealth to be produced. When working people demand better wages or benefits, the rich owners do not willingly comply, but often brutally resist.

In recent years, workers at Tesla Motors factories have bemoaned hazardous labour conditions and unpaid overtime, as well as low pay. The idealism of Musk proved to have its limits as the chief executive has, until stopped by a recent court ruling, blocked attempts by workers to unionise. 

Musk doesn’t do this because he’s a particularly bad person but rather because his own wealth depends on workers not being paid what their labour is worth. This relationship is unashamedly exploitative. Billionaires are a hazardous symptom of the injustice of private property. In other words, the ultra-rich never had a right to the wealth that they claim as theirs.

The existence of billionaires is not isolated from the societies they inhabit. The movements of these titans reverberate around the world. Musk may be a very nice person, with sincere intentions to change the world for good, but the quality of his soul is irrelevant. What matters are the tangible consequences of his power and the economic system that enables it.

Living up to democracy 

Democracy is a project to distil power and enhance freedom. However, power has many faces and functions. Too often is it seen as explicitly or exclusively political. But it moves outside the chambers of parliament and lives beyond the ballot box. Economic power translates into political influence. And, in a world in which billionaires have more wealth than 4.9-billion people, the political influence of the rich towers over the votes of ordinary citizens.

Politicians are increasingly detested for their failure to respond to the socioeconomic needs of citizens. This is because the needs of citizens have become a secondary concern in numerous countries.

Through campaign donations, think-tanks and foundations, lobby groups, corporate media or blatant corruption, the imperatives of the rich are often placed at the centre of governance. To sustain political careers, politicians have become dependent on funding from individuals who are unelected, unaccountable and untethered from any commitment to transparency.

Both modest and extreme examples of this subversion of democracy exist. Musk is not innocent in this regard, but rather an active player of the game. For nearly two decades Musk has given large donations to the Republican Party, specifically a GOP action committee dedicated to regaining control of the House of Representatives. 

Musk is hailed as one of the righteous rich seeking to stop the ravages of climate change; it’s odd that he has disproportionately funded a party that denies the reality of climate change while advocating policies that will intensify the destruction of our planet.

South Africa is not immune to the meddling of the super rich. An estimated R400-million was donated to Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidential campaign. The sources and exact purposes of these donations remains hidden for now. But one can’t help but wonder what burdens these donations place on the president. Will the interests of his donors clash with those of the citizens his office is mandated to serve?

It’s hard to defend or praise the extremely rich, because they are manifestations of all that is wrong with our prevailing economic order. A new global aristocracy is being birthed and Musk is one of its mightiest members. Like his counterparts around the world, the reign of private property allows him to exert his will on the world, diluting democracy and curtailing freedom.

***

The Guardian

Google threatens to leave Australia – but its poker face is slipping

Analysis: tech firm’s refusal to pay news publishers comes as it agrees to do exactly that in France

Google’s warning is hardly unusual in an industry that is loathe to encourage countries to go it alone when it comes to sweeping regulation. Photograph: Andre M Chang/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

Alex Hern UK technology editor

Last modified on Fri 22 Jan 2021

The biggest companies in technology love an ultimatum but rarely do they spell out their threats. This week, however, Google has done exactly that, telling an Australian parliamentary hearing that a proposed law forcing the company to pay news publishers for the right to link to their content “would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia”.

The threat, from the company’s Australian managing director, Mel Silva, is the latest escalation in a war of words over the proposal, which seeks to undo some of the damage online business models have dealt to the country’s publishing industry.

The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, told a press conference “we don’t respond to threats”. But Google’s warning is hardly unusual in an industry that is loathe to encourage countries to go it alone when it comes to sweeping regulation.

Last September, for example, Facebook told an Irish court that it may have to pull out of the European market entirely if a court judgment banning data flows between the US and UK was upheld. “In the event that [Facebook] were subject to a complete suspension of the transfer of users’ data to the US,” the company’s associate general counsel argued, “it is not clear … how, in those circumstances, it could continue to provide the Facebook and Instagram services in the EU.”

Similarly, tech companies have been warning for years that a UK attempt to regulate end-to-end encryption could lead to their messaging services being unfeasible to offer in Britain.

But rarely do governments hold their nerve for long enough for the threats to be uttered loudly and clearly. Facebook, for instance, rowed back its warning to the Irish court in press statements, saying it was merely “setting out the simple reality”; and those messaging services are happy to mutter warnings in private, but have not yet seen the need to stick their head above the parapet for a knock-down battle.

Australia, though, has a knack for picking fights. It already had one such standoff with Amazon after sales tax changes in 2018 meant the company refused to ship imports to Australia in order to avoid collecting tax on those purchases.

But that felt like a win-win for some Australians, closing a tax loophole and boosting local retailers at the same time. The loss of Google’s search engine may be felt more keenly.

Google has followed through on similar threats in the past. Spanish users cannot access Google News to this day, after a law in the country intended to force Google to pay newspapers for excerpting links and headlines instead resulted in the company simply removing its news product.

The Australian law, by contrast, seeks to avoid Google taking the easy way out. By requiring payments for any links to news, even on the main search engine – and by covering Facebook as well – the country hopes to succeed in extracting revenue from Google, regardless of its threats.

Unfortunately for Google, the company has a bad poker face. Even as it was warning Australian senators that it would have to pull out of the country rather than pay the newly levied fee, on the other side of the world in France, Google had agreed to do just that. In an agreement signed between Google France and the industrial body representing the country’s news industry, Google will pay licensing fees to individual news publishers to reuse their material online. Backed by France’s strong copyright protections for the news industry, Google had already negotiated with a few publishers, including Le Monde, but the new agreement sets a blanket precedent.

“Withdrawing our services from Australia is the last thing that Google want to have happen, especially when there is another way forward,” Silva told Australian senators on Friday. It might pretend it has not, but in France the company has already discovered that other way forward. And thanks to Google Translate, you don’t even need to speak French to read it for yourself.