Technology and Society
Three Paradoxes
February 28, 2019
How quaint the ways of Paradox!
At common sense she gaily mocks!
A most ingenious paradox.
~The Pirates of Penzance
Paradox 1. Personalization
The systems we engage with online love to provide “personalization” by learning who we are, our interests, our habits, our associations so as to “improve the customer experience.” It would be inefficient to make our own choices among a generic list of movies or news articles or search results about that rash on our elbow. Those results should be hand-picked by an invisible concierge who knows what we have watched, read, and been worried about in the past. Our machines of loving grace know us well. We’re practically engaged.
But human beings? It’s so much work interacting with them, even for trivial tasks. Why be forced to chat with a cashier when you can scan your groceries yourself? The cashier might notice you’re buying unhealthy snacks. That could be an embarrassing intrusion on your privacy. Why visit a bookstore where the owner might want to talk about what you like to read as you browse the shelves? How intrusive! Yet we don’t seem to mind that Amazon tracks every move we make as we browse their site. We just don’t see it happening.
We’re being groomed to avoid people (who require costly wages) while accepting the all-seeing eye watching us online. The “improved customer experience,” of course, has everything to do with making money – either by being more effective at selling you a consumer good, getting you to click on an ad, or adding more personally identified information to the vast data pool that can become training data for behavior modification. In other words, we’re being personalized.
Paradox 2. Freedom of Speech
Platforms that do not create speech but make a handy profit from distributing it have claimed the high ground of the First Amendment. Speech should only be regulated in the rarest of instances. Tech platforms, of course, are not governed by the first amendment, which only relates to what the state can or cannot do, but tech culture has embraced free speech as a principle. John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was modeled on the US Declaration of Independence, and it states “anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
Of course, cyberspace has never been independent. Servers and headquarters have real-world addresses and tech companies must comply with local law. In addition, the profitable platforms we use to express ourselves, search, and share require us to agree to terms of service, legally enforceable restrictions that give the platforms governance over speech. How those rules are enforced can be capricious and self-serving. A private citizen might be suspended from Twitter for speech that doesn’t knock the Tweeter-in-Chief offline. Moreover, these platforms profit from “sticky” content. Their algorithm