Opposable Planets

Bing Crosby was the first person to use a microphone to croon.  Bing realized the microphone allowed the performer to deliver an intimate performance.  You didn’t need to shout to be heard at the back of the hall.   Tone trumped volume as Bing  sang like he was in your living room.

FDR harnessed the power of the radio and the “fireside chat” to bring intimacy and a new connection to your government.

Brando was the first actor to embrace the medium of film (contrast with the early talkies who simply shouted vaudeville style into the camera.).  Brando delivered intimacy and dramatic range.

Barack Obama’s YouTube weekly address, not to mention his social network and Twitter account  brings another level of  intimacy with an on-demand relationship with your government.

Tweet This Post 

Murphy Goode, a Sonoma County winery, set up a promotion that looks great on paper:

We want to hire a social media whiz (your title will be “Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent”) who will report on the cool lifestyle of Sonoma County Wine Country and, of course, tell people what you’re learning about winemaking.
Did we mention that the compensation was $10,000 per month Plus accommodations in a beautiful home in picturesque Healdsburg, a popular vacation destination in our neck of the woods. Working hours are flexible. And all you have to do is experience wine and good living, and then tell people about it.

MG then set about having candidates publicly apply.   The whole world was invited to vote on potential candidates.   The campaign seemed to be doing well in terms of attention and media and candidate interest.   Then yesterday Twitter lit up.  Not Good(e).  Bad.  Apparently the top vote getter by a 2:1 margin (@martinsargent) wasn’t included in their first cut of 50 candidates.   Voters felt robbed - and said some nasty things…

It is hard to get clear about what actually happened.  I didn’t call Murphy Goode and their website isn’t very helpful in helping understand the terms and conditions of their selection process.  What is interesting to me is how yet again, if the general circumstances are accurate, this whole situation could have been avoided so easily.  The operative word in the term social media is “social.”  When you get engaged in social media you need to abide by a simple social contract.  A contract that is so simple in fact that many people engaged in the complexity of business tend to overlook it.   What is this divine mystery?

Respect people’s time and attention the same way you would if you actually knew them in a social context.

People feel cheated because Murphy Goode asked for their time and attention - solicited their opinion - then seemed to ignore the overwhelming majority of opinion.   Boil this down to a social context.   Would you have a few friends spend a lot of time debating and then voting on which movie to see and then ignore the major vote-getter completely?   I don’t think so.   Remember, the stakes weren’t even as high as a movie here.  This was the top 50 — not the  final winner.

So where next for Murphy Goode?   Will this damage the campaign or their brand in any significant way?

I don’t think so.

The Social Media crowd tends to see itself as the center of the universe.  And gets quite giddy during any flexing of its (admittedly rather small) muscle.  It is also a pretty self-righteous group of lumpen-digerati.    I don’t think this maneuver will have a major impact on the bottom line.  That said it must be a bit painful and surprising to those at Murphy Goode.  I am sure they are having anxious meetings over how to respond.    If they are trying to reach influencers now via this 6 month campaign many of the same people they wanted to have spread their message (social media infuencers) will either obstruct or ignore them.    Also, in the search driven world, this has the potential to generate a permanent, findable record of discontent when searching for Murphy Goode.   Mostly, this is just a simple lesson in common sense.   I suspect it will be forgotten fairly quickly - but was eminently avoidable.

Tweet This Post 

“We know what we do.  We know why we do what we do.  What we don’t know is what what we do does” – Michel Foucualt*

@lucatoledo reminded me that it is the 25th anniversary of French Philosopher Michel Foucault’s death.  I have been sitting on this short post that was originally going to cap my series on The Digital Panopticon.   So, on the occassion, and a bit unpolished, here it is.

Discussions about technology largely focus on immediate utility.  They rarely address the larger effect that technology might have on the individual and society.   So it goes with the social media phenomenon – we are absorbed in very granular discussions of use (what it is, why it matters for commerce and how to gain advantage from it) and abuse (Twitter addiction leads to the break up of  Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer etc.) while a much larger drama is unfolding as a consequence of these technologies – the changing notions of identity, society and government.

We need to get better at figuring out “what what we do does”.   What are the consequences of living in a totally networked society?   What will be the new equilibrium we reach on identity, privacy rights, work-life boundaries etc?
The Social Nervous System we are building makes it possible to create a smarter world.   From sensor based infrastructure management like the smart grid, to deep text mining  to assess market sentiment (what the cloud of conversations means for your company) and the social graph.  But  smarter is not necessarily better.   Better is a blend of technology with foresight and ethics.

As I have written before, “It is very possible that just as the development of the neuron enabled a proliferation of new, sophisticated life forms we are developing the next equivalent, the social neuron that binds us into a new, larger social organism.”   I believe the Social Nervous System spells profound and protracted changes to every aspect of society, economy and government.  We should be asking questions that live up to the scope of the change we see around us.   We should not limit this conversation to academia.  This conversation should be social (pun intended).

This is my biggest argument around social media commentary– there is not enough critical questioning – it is one giant echochamber of early adopters focusing on a narrow set of issues – New marketing, new PR, or better business as usual…  Most of those talking (myself included) are also making a living doing the talking so the deck is a bit stacked (see - The Evangelist Fallacy for more on this).
At bottom, no one is quite sure of where things will shake out – what the benefits and consequences will be.  While I am generally optimistic (see Why Business Needs to Get Social) I am aware that the theory of things (what I believe a thing is for) often misses the effect those things have in the world… We should always have one eye on “what what we do does” for therein lies the true significance of any technology or institution.

In the meantime you can catch me giving it up on the Social Web (@jmichele)…

(Image from @schuschny’s blog post on Foucault)

Tweet This Post 

Today Ken Majer – change-agent and leadership guru to many large corporations -  asked for my opinion on why Twitter was receiving so much attention - how much of it is well deserved, how much PR hype.   While the new media aspect of what is happening in Iran has been well covered and I generally avoid current events, I thougt I would share my response here.

The chatter about Twitter is well deserved and a core example of what I have been calling The Social Nervous System - a system that uses Internet communication technology to coordinate events in the real world.   Twitter is a decentralized messaging system with an incredibly low barrier to entry in terms of ease of use and single-purpose functionality…  Each of these factors help explain its  rapid growth as a tool for socializing and answering its default question “What are you Doing?”   Twitter reached its watershed moment during the Mumbai attacks last November when the answer to  “what are you doing” became urgent and important news.    it was used as a real-time news service and was running 10 minutes ahead of CNN….    Its utility as real time news during a breaking situation is what is driving the press now… not PR.   Iranians on both sides have been using it to push information out… Since it is decentralized you are not dealing with the leadership of these factions but actual citizens engaged in struggle….   That direct, emotional, on-the-ground connection in combination with the real-time nature of the story as it unfolds is truly compelling.

Let me break down these elements individually.

Twitter is Single Purpose - Twitter only really tries to do one thing - a simple, character-constrained messaging service.   It asks one question, “what are you doing?”  It provides you one window in which to enter your text and one button to publish.   This single purpose design creates two critical side effects:  1. It lowers the barrier to entry and is incredibly easy to use. 2. it creates myriad opportunities for others to build on top of (see Platforms beat Applications) - Currently I believe there are over 2000 services that help you manage your Twitter presence.  For example,  I use Tweetdeck to aggregate and publish Tweets,  bitly as my URL shortener, MrTweet to find people I might be interested in and Twitterific as my iPhone client.    A radically simple tool for socializing explains how Twitter got liftoff - but not why it is being used in situations like Iran….For that you need to consider that…

Twitter is Decentralized - Anyone can create a Twitter account.  Tweets can be authored, published or consumed easily  from laptops or mobile devices.  Twitter is a radically democratic medium allowing anyone, anywhere to connect.

Twitter is Direct - When you search on Twitter, or follow - you are hearing directly from a human being.  There is no PR layer (usually).  In Iran this means that you are hearing directly from people in the street.  This direct, human connection is powerful.

Twitter is Real Time - Twitter runs in real time.  When you search Twitter it is all about now.   The enforced brevity of 140 characters further accelerates the speed of communication.  These are dispatches with a lag time of seconds - not even hours.

Twitter Allows Asymmetric relationships (or Twitter Works Like a Populist News Service) : Unlike Facebook - you can follow anyone you like (unless they have protected their profile - which very few ppl do).  This means that Twitter can replicate the way influence works in society  — meaning, human attention can be directed to whatever person “earns” that attention.  That attention doesn’t “cost” the influencer anything because Twitter is asymmetric — you can follow me — I don’t need to follow you if I do not choose to.  I don’t even need to know who you are….  In this regard it is more like a broadcast tool.    This asymmetric property also accelerates the diffusion of information since there is much more cross-pollination of followers/followed than in a more symmetric model like Facebook where both parties must agree to be friends…. All of this to say - Twitter is structured to be function better as a new service than other social technologies.

Twitter is now part of  the revolutionary’s toolkit just as Mumbai made it  a part of the emergency response toolkit.  What happens next is anyone’s guess.

Tweet This Post 

People don’t call telephone numbers - people call people. (ripped and reapplied from the NRA slogan)  Despite that truism, numbers have historically  been the most convenient way to designate the people we want to reach.  I may know you as Jim - but if I want to call “Jim” I better get way more specific… Numbers do the job quite nicely.  In the beginning  telephone numbers were short (2 or three digits)- because  there weren’t a whole lot of people who had a phone.   As the number of telephone owners exploded - the digits increased in order to accommodate the unique endpoints.

Just like the telephone  there has been an explosion in the number of people online (1.7 billion and adding about 100 million every month) many of whom are establishing their identity on the social web with blogs, social networks, Twitter etc…  Unlike the telephone system, we are far from working out how to create unique identifiers for these identities.  It’s a mess.

I have four active email addresses, accounts on three social networks (that I remember), two telephone numbers, a Google Voice number (to bind the former two) a Twitter account and at least three username/password combinations to log in to the myriad  services that I subscribe to (from banking to Netflix and well beyond).   More broadly, I have an abbreviated name (Joshua Ross) that was quite unique when I was growing up but  today a search on “Joshua Ross”  brings up an Australian Olympic Athlete, a Rabbi and a recent felon convicted of marijuana possession in the U.S. South (it wasn’t me, I swear…)  There is even a Joshua Ross on MySpace who is a musician (my band is on MySpace and I once had a semi-professional career as a musician) - That is pretty close to home.   There are a lot of Joshua Ross imposters up to all kinds of no good.   I am nowhere in the top 10.

Somewhere along the line I got wise.   My full name is Joshua-Michéle Ross.  Now the combinatorics begin to work in my favor.  I can’t find a single contender for that Jewish-Italian hybrid.  While this helps me establish my identity online - it makes me unfindable to old high school friends looking me up since the “michéle” is a new development.   But just like the phone number I needed to add digits to get a unique designation.   When it came to Twitter however, where each character counts, my name became a liability so I am @jmichele….  Solving one problem begets another…

Tweet This Post 

Platforms beat applications.  OK -    So what is a platform?  The nomenclature of platforms and applications arise from technology but I will use a low tech retail metaphor.   An application in this analogy is The Foot Locker (let’s just say) while the platform is the Mall.   The mall is a platform in that it provides many of the conditions necessary for The Foot Locker to exist;  physical infrastructure, foot traffic (no pun originally intended) etc.   This allows The Foot Locker to focus its attention on what it does best - market and sell shoes.  They don’t need to allocate finances towards owning the building and all the hazards that entails.    If Foot Locker is unsuccessful, there are other small business owners that might be eager to make use of the space in the mall.   The mall is a platform that allows myriad small/large businesses to flourish.

The best exemplar of the platform recently is the iPhone.   The iPhone allows developers to build applications that reside on the iPhone (the mall if you will).  These applications can take full advantage of the iPhone’s physical infrastructure (sensors like the accelerometer for games, microphone, GPS chipset etc.) and reach (37 million iPhones to date).  This is a compelling proposition.   There have been 35,000 applications developed - and 1 billion application downloads.   iPhone is now opening up its hardware to allow people to develop physical devices… (I imagine my iPhone as a netbook in the near future).

Platforms can be a powerful concept for re-imagining your business and is part of what I talk about when I say, Open beats Closed.   There is more talent outside your walls than within — find a way to tap into that creative potential.  Platforms are also a way of reimagining  our government….

This is the heart of Ed Felten’s recent post, Government Data and the Invisible Hand, on how to make government more transparent.  The genius stroke is right here at the beginning,

If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Beautiful… Felten is telling Government to build a platform that leverages citizen engagement.   It is an interesting notion to think about how new technological advancements (namely, the Internet) will reconfigure our very notion of democracy.    My Society and Frontseat (see my interview with founder Mike Mathieu here) already take available data for citizens to remix.  Imagine how powerful this can be if government saw itself as a platform rather than owning the whole mall.

Tweet This Post 

I often say that on the social web there are no experts - only experiments.  The fastest learner wins.

We are living through a sea change in business - Think about media with music, newspapers and publishing - or manufacturing with Flip (nearly two guys in a garage - design, manufacture in China, market online - then hit the big box stores and finally sell to Cisco for 1/2 billion) Astro Gaming (similar story without the buyout yet), and the new crowdsourced Crunchpad- think about the ubiquity of mobile devices and their rapid evolution or the rise of Twitter and the first chink in Google’s armor etc.

In these conditions the only lasting advantage a company has lies in its ability to adapt rapidly.

Which brings me to Eric Ries.  I have had the privilege to do some work recently with Eric, author of the Lessons Learned blog — Eric’s basic premise is that a startup needs to maximize its resources and have a relentless focus on creating tight, iterative decision loops.  A lean startup is defined by

1. Leveraging already-existing software and services whenever possible (off the shelf, open source etc.)
2. Using Agile development to quickly prototype, test and deploy functional code
3. Aggressively testing reality every chance they get with REAL customers (aka customer development)

Startups obviously need to run lean - they have modest resources and no real idea if the products they are putting out will meet actual customer demand.

But these conditions (uncertainty and rapid change) and these practices (customer development, agile and rapid prototyping) are not only advantages for startups - As Eric points out, they can be defensive tools for an Enterprise.    This is an interview I ran with Eric on behalf of O’Reilly Media.  It originally appeared a few days ago in a post by Tim O’Reilly welcoming Eric to the Radar community.

Eric will be running Lean Startup Master Classes over the coming months — whether you are a startup or not - this is a game changing approach to product development.

Tweet This Post 

This post is part three of a series raising questions about the mass adoption of social technologies. Here are links to part one and two. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27. (special guest to be announced shortly)

In 1785 utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed architectural plans for the Panopticon, a prison Bentham described as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” Its method was a circular grid of surveillance; the jailors housed in a central tower being provided a 360-degree view of the imprisoned. Prisoners would not be able to tell when a jailor was actually watching or not. The premise ran that under the possibility of total surveillance (you could be being observed at any moment of the waking day) the prisoners would self-regulate their behavior to conform to prison norms. The perverse genius of the Panopticon was that even the jailor existed within this grid of surveillance; he could be viewed at any time (without knowing) by a still higher authority within the central tower - so the circle was complete, the surveillance - and thus conformance to authority - total.

In 1811 the King refused to authorize the sale of land for the purpose and Bentham was left frustrated in his vision to build the Panopticon. But the concept endured - not just as a literal architecture for controlling physical subjects (there are many Panopticons that now bear Bentham’s stamp) - but as a metaphor for understanding the function of power in modern times. French philosopher Michel Foucault dedicated a whole section of his book Discipline and Punish to the significance of the Panopticon. His take was essentially this: The same mechanism at work in the Panopticon - making subjects totally visible to authority - leads to those subjects internalizing the norms of power. In Foucault’s words “…the major effect of the Panopticon; to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary” In short, under the possibility of total surveillance the inmate becomes self regulating.

The social technologies we see in use today are fundamentally panoptical - the architecture of participation is inherently an architecture of surveillance.

In the age of social networks we find ourselves coming under a vast grid of surveillance - of permanent visibility. The routine self-reporting of what we are doing, reading, thinking via status updates makes our every action and location visible to the crowd. This visibility has a normative effect on behavior (in other words we conform our behavior and/or our speech about that behavior when we know we are being observed).

In many cases we are opting into automated reporting structures (Google Lattitude, Loopt etc.) that detail our location at any given point in time. We are doing this in exchange for small conveniences (finding local sushi more quickly, gaining “ambient intimacy”) without ever considering the bargain that we are striking. In short, we are creating the ultimate Panopticon - with our data centrally housed in the cloud (see previous post on the Captivity of the Commons) - our every movement, and up-to-the-minute status is a matter of public record. In the same way that networked communications move us from a one to many broadcast model to a many to many - so we are seeing the move to a many-to-many surveillance model. A global community of voyeurs ceaselessly confessing to “What are you doing? (Twitter) or “What’s on your mind? (Facebook)

Captivity of the Commons focused on the risks corporate ownership of personal data. This post is concerned with how, as individuals, we have grown comfortable giving our information away; how our sense of privacy is changing under the small conveniences that disclosure brings. How our identity changes as an effect of constant self-disclosure. Many previous comments have rightly noted that privacy is often cultural — if you don’t expect it - there is no such thing as an infringement. Yet it is important to reckon with the changes we see occurring around us and argue what kind of a culture we wish to create (or contribute to).

Jacques Ellul’s book, Propaganda, had a thesis that was at once startling and obvious: Propaganda’s end goal is not to change your mind at any one point in time - but to create a changeable mind. Thus when invoked at the necessary time - humans could be manipulated into action. In the U.S. this language was expressed by catchphrases like, “communism in our backyard,” “enemies of freedom” or the current manufactured hysteria about Obama as a “socialist”.

Similarly the significance of status updates and location based services may not lie in the individual disclosure but in the significance of a culture that has become accustomed to constant disclosure.

Tweet This Post 

This post is part two of the series, “The Question Concerning Social Technology”. That appeared on Radar. Part one is here. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27.

In January 2002 DARPA launched the Information Awareness Office. The mission was to, “ imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness (emphasis added)” The notion of a government agency achieving total information awareness was too Orwellian to ignore. Under criticism that this “awareness” could quickly migrate to a mass surveillance system the program was defunded.

Fast-forward to last week and my near-purchase of Libbey Duratuff Gibralter Glasses (the perfect bourbon glass one might speculate). Over the course of the next few days I was peppered with exact-match ads for Libbey Duratuff glassware on several other websites; A small example of information awareness at work.

Personal data is the currency of Web 2.0. Knowing what we watch, buy, click, own, what we think, intend and ultimately do confers competitive advantage. Facebook possesses your social graph, your personal interests and your full profile (age, location, relationship status etc.) not to mention your daily (or hourly) answer to their persistent question, “what’s on your mind?”. Reviewing the “25 Surprising Things Google Knows About You” should give anyone pause. And it’s not just the Web 2.0 set. Credit Card Companies, Telcos, Insurance , Pharma… all are collecting vast stores of personal data. If you watch the trendline it is moving toward more data and more analytic capability - not less.

So why is it that we seem to have more comfort when the capacity for total information awareness lies with corporations as opposed to government? Experience shows that there is a very thin barrier between the two. To wit, the release of thousands of phone records to the U.S. government - and, conveniently, government immunity for those same corporations after the breach. Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft have all been accused of cooperating with the Chinese government to aid censorship and repression of free speech. What happens if/when we encounter the next version of the Bush administration that sees no problem abrogating civil rights in pursuit of “evildoers”?

What’s more, when we deliver our personal information over to corporations we are giving this data over to an institution that is amoral. Companies are not yet structured to deliver moral or ethical results - they are encouraged to grow and deliver “shareholder value” (read money) which is a numb and narrow measure of value. Do I want my data to be managed by an amoral institution?

To be clear - I want the convenience and miracles that modern technology brings. I love the Internet and I am willing to give over lots of data in the trade. But I want two fundamental protections:

First, change the corporation. The structure of the corporation continues to be driven by 20th century hard goals of efficiency and scale - not by more complex measures of environmental sustainability, value creation and the commonweal. These are simply not adequately factored into any structural, organizational, incentive or taxation systems of business today. Profit and profit motive are fine - but hiding social and environmental costs is no longer acceptable. I want to deal with institutions capable of morality. This is no small task - but if we can build the Internet….

Second. We need a right to privacy that matches the 21st century reality. As a friend of mine likes to say, “privacy is now a responsibility - not a right.” While it is pithy (and perhaps true), the reason we grant rights - and laws to enforce those rights in society is the simple fact that people do not generally have the wherewithal to protect themselves from large, institutional interests. In the same way that regulatory structures are needed to keep a financial system in balance (alas even the Ayn Rand acolyte Greenspan finally agrees with this truism), we need new rights and regulations governing the use of our personal data - and simple sets of controls over who has access to it.

The true work of the 21st century lies not in refining our technology - this we will achieve without any political will. The work lies in re-imagining our institutions.

Tweet This Post 

Over the coming days I will cross post my series, “The Question Concerning Social Technology” which appeared all week on Radar. I advise readers to head over to these posts and read the comments — they were rich and thoughtful.

The Evangelist Fallacy

I am an evangelist of social media and an active participant: on Linked In (business), MySpace (music) and Facebook (increasingly my online identity), I blog on several sites and I am a daily user of Twitter. I also make my living speaking to companies about the value and operating principles of these more open, participatory technologies.

I have read the proponents that abound (Why I Love Twitter, Groundswell, Here Comes Everybody etc.) and found much to agree with. I have read the detractors (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” …, Facebook Addiction is Real etc.…) and found little to agree with.

So over the course of the next few days I will post a series of questions on the value and function of social media (a.k.a. social technologies). I will not be arguing that social technologies are a bane or should be stopped. I don’t believe the former is true and I believe the latter is impossible… I will not be arguing against technology. Rather, I will raise questions about the potential abuse of social technologies and the steps we might take to remedy them. The more discussion this prompts within the Radar community the better. I will also be leading a webcast on May 27 at 10AM Pacific to discuss these topics in detail.

This is the first of these posts:

The Evangelist Fallacy, Social Media and The New Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment swept through Europe in the eighteenth century, upending the notion of a divine right (religious and monarchic) to rule over the population. Its tenets centered upon the idea that humans were capable of reason and could seek governance that accorded individuals liberty and some semblance of equality. Western society still embraces principles and speaks the language of “freedom,” “democracy,” and civil rights born during The Enlightenment.
There is another side of the historical record. While the public dialogue of The Enlightenment was centered on freedom, equality and human progress, institutions of the age were rapidly developing sophisticated means of control over individual movement and action; from highly structured factory work and military regimentation (the true birthplace of modern management theory), to isolating deviant segments of society (the birth of prisons, debtor’s prisons and asylums) and an emphasis on police surveillance and the “dossier” to track behavior. In fact many of the same political and social theorists of Enlightenment (Montesquieu, Bentham etc.) were the architects of detailed studies on how to subject individuals to institutional control. These tactical manuevers were often cloaked in the more lofty rhetoric of The Englightement.

This is not an isolated reading of history. Knowledge is almost always being produced in service of power - not as a liberating force from it and there is always a gap between what a society proclaims about it’s goals and aims - and the functional outcomes of its institutional policies and procedures (the “War on Drugs” being a quintessential modern example).
The idea of social technologies as a liberating force echoes the Enlightenment language and, just as with the original, there are good reasons to view this discourse with some skepticism. This knowledge about the value and meaning of social technologies comes from industry champions (Cisco’s Human Network), industry analysts and corporate consultants. This discourse is good for business - I know because I speak regularly on the topic in boardrooms and at conferences. Proponents have a personal stake in seeing the positive side of the equation (and there is a positive side) and encourage participation as a means of personal empowerment (“the customer is now in charge” “the end of command and control hierarchy” etc.).
Social media is cloaked in this language of liberation while the corporate sponsors (Facebook, Google et al ) are progressing towards ever more refined and effective means of manipulating individual behavior (behavioral targeting of ads, recommendation systems, reputation management systems etc.). As with the enlightenment the tactics of control are shielded by a rhetoric of emancipation. Let’s not forget that the output of all of this social participation is massive dossiers on individual behavior (your social network profiles, photos, location, status updates, searches etc.) and social activity.
How do these corporations intend to use these vast records of our behavior? The next post, Captivity of the Commons will explore the risks associated with personal data being collected at the behest of corporations whose main motivation is not in service of “customer empowerment” but on the traditional goals of manipulating behavior to grow their share of wallet.

Tweet This Post