Calculate and rule

To be a citizen today means to be a “conductor of irritations for timely collective psychoses,” noted the philosopher Peter Slaterdike . An endless stream of publications about the Moscow 57th school is a bright illustration of this thought. To blame the Facebook community, longing for more and more exposure, would be a gesture clearly asocial. Yes, and the appeals in such cases are not for anything - a little time passes, and a new wave, a new “thematic epidemic” comes.

New media taught us to constant mobilization. Whether we are talking about catching Pokemon in churches or the name of a new site about books - you must take your position, rallying with like -minded people in the next battalion. Yesterday's fellow soldiers at the same time end up on different sides of the barricades.

Social networks are not about the dialogue, but about the division. In many ways, this is determined by the device of networks, the algorithms of which generate the effect of "echo cameras". Based on the user's past likes, they clip him in a cozy informational world, where he rarely breaks through what his beliefs can shake. Sometimes this narcissistic comfort is violated, and “disfigure” or hate go into business Speech .

The fact that not everything in the world of social networks is spontaneously happening and users can be adjusted, we were recently reminded of the revelations of former employees of the American Facebook , which systematically excluded from the top news of the conservative media articles and materials about the Republicans.

The algorithms are omnipresent and invisible, like air. Regularly tracking our network activity, they filter the news feed, offer new friends, books, music, films and petitions for signature. For some time now, algorithms trust the choice of a partner and even the identification of potential recidivists. All the charms of such justice were recently felt by American Eric Lumis, sentenced to six years in prison for driving a car that appeared in street shooting, and an attempt to escape during detention. The verdict helped Lumisus the Visconsin judge a computer algorithm developed by the private company NorthPointe Inc. Based on interrogations of the defendant, the algorithm determined that Lumis is a danger to society.

Sometimes it seems that the main goal of software developers with their desire to give out another application for all occasions is to turn society into an infantile accumulation, ready to give any decision to be given to technologies.

In technology for processing large data, the media theoretic Lev Manovich sees a new chapter in the history of communication funds. She was preceded by the stages of mass reproduction (starting from the 16th century), wide broadcasting (1920 and further) and the network (since 1993). The new stage-media analytics-came between 1995, the year of the first search engines, and 2010, when the number of Facebook users reached 500 million.

Any Internet site is now resorting to algorithmic data analysis, where users order or share cultural benefits and communicate with each other. The media analyst, as these calculations calls Manovich, today determines the state of the entire cultural industry. “When Adorno and Horkheimer wrote“ the dialectic of education ”, interpersonal relations were not yet part of the cultural industry,” the researcher writes . -However, in “software” and they were “industrialized”-organized using interfaces, agreements and instruments of social networks and instant messengers. They are also affected by algorithms that process all interactions and decisive data, what content, updates and information to show. ”

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer introduced the concept of “cultural industry” in 1947, when it seemed that Hollywood and radio stations had finally turned the culture into standardized goods, and its consumers into apolitical conformists. The authors of the "Education Dialectics" saw in the popular culture exclusively the manipulation tool, which its manufacturers in the interests of the establishment subjected the mass.

The products of Silicon Valley are also subjected to the same criticism. The consumer must feel comfortable, and no doubt should disturb his anabiosis - this installation is related by the creators of new technologies with engineers of the system that Adorno and Horkheimer were so tirelessly and not always reasonably. Sometimes it seems that the main goal of software developers with their desire to give out another application for all occasions is to turn society into an infantile accumulation, ready to give any decision to be given to technologies.

Today, in the academic literature, the only number - the “cultural industry” - often prefer the multiple - “cultural industries”, thereby knocking down the pessimistic pathos of the Frankfurt school and emphasizing the ambiguous nature of the phenomenon. So Lev Manovich rightly notes that the algorithms themselves are neutral. They allow "to control and release, create new knowledge and limit them, find love and indulge in consumption."

Nevertheless, algorithms are created by people and may well “inherit” the prejudices of their developers. And they do not arise in the political and socio-economic vacuum. The old cultural industry players like Hollywood studios and book publishers were replaced by companies such as Google , Amazon , Eb Ay , Facebook and others engaged in the production and marketing of cultural products. The companies that are striving, in the words of the American researcher of Siva Weidanatan, "to become operators of our daily life." It is naive to believe that the corporations of Silicon Valley are not aware of the authorities granted to it by technologies. And it is equally naive that they are deprived of political interests.

A couple of years ago, the American scientific journal ProChedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a study with the intriguing name "Experimental confirmation of mass emotional infection through social networks." The author of the article was psychologist Adam Kramer, who worked in one of the Facebook departments. The experiment that was discussed was that the social networks were secretly removed from the news tape of messages painted in negatively, for others positively - to find out how this would affect their emotional state.

The publication in PNAS caused violent indignation in the media. Facebook was branded for how famously, without warning, he turned more than half a million of his users into experimental rats. And during the discussions about the ethical side of the experiment, it turned out that almost every major Internet company regularly exposes its audience to such tests. And most often not so much in scientific as in corporate interests.

The experiment on users described in PNAS was far from the first in the history of Facebook . In November 2010, on the day of the intermediate elections to Congress, the company posted tens of millions of Americans in the ribbons. They had a link to information about polling stations, button - to announce to everyone that you voted - and photographs of friends who have already fulfilled their civic duty. As political scientists who planned the study later reported, subjects users voted 0.39% more willingly than users from the control group who did not receive any elections. In total, it was possible to attract to the election urns - taking into account the wave launched by joyful reports on Facebook tapes - 340 thousand people.

It is naive to believe that the corporations of Silicon Valley are not aware of the authorities granted to it by technologies. And it is equally naive that they are deprived of political interests.

Do you think Facebook has stopped his experiments on this? A few days before the end of registration for a referendum on the exit of Great Britain from the European Union, the company began to publish in the tape of users of the reminder. On the same day, about 186 thousand online applications of those wishing to participate were registered-this figure exceeded the statistics of the previous days more than doubled. Moreover, applications for registration were submitted mainly to young people, which for the most part advocated preserving the country's membership in the EU. True, the influx of Millennialov did not save the UK from Brexit-but still imagine that Mark Zuckerberg is seriouslylet to bring some candidate or party to power. The analysis of user data without any work will determine the circle of persons with the necessary political preferences. And Facebook has tools for their mobilization.

Even deeper than Facebook , Google products are rooted in our daily life. How many times a day are we “google” information we need? Many at the same time know that the search results are customized. But this does not interfere with considered them objective. How the search algorithm that builds thousands of web pages in an ordered list works, while it remains a mystery. Few people look beyond the first page of issuance - this forces some companies to spend round amounts to be in the top.

American psychologists Robert Epstein and Ronald Robertson decided to find out whether search results can affect the outcome of the election campaign. To do this, since 2013, they conducted an experiment in which from hundreds to two thousand Americans participated. People were offered to choose one of two politicians for voting and gave 15 minutes to search for information about them (for the sake of objectivity, real candidates were used-the Australian Prime Minister participants in 2010). A specially created search engine issued the first group of subjects to the results of the results where in the first places there were links to purely positive materials about one of the candidates. The second group got positive information about its competitor. The third, control, group received mixed results. As a result, subjects from the first two groups constantly chose the candidates for whom they were campaigned by the search engine.

Then the experience was repeated in India before the elections to the lower house of the country's parliament. 2150 people out of 35 Indian states provided information about the three main candidates for the position of prime minister (the leader of the majority party becomes them). And the preferences of the experiment participants shifted by 20 percent - and in some demographic groups and all 60 - in favor of the candidate for whom the search engine advanced. At the same time, 99.5% were not even aware of manipulations. And those few who knew about her, this information did not prevent the choice of the candidate whom the search engine offered.

Discussing all the “twitter-revolution” of recent times and the liberation potential of new technologies, we ourselves did not notice how we found ourselves in the power of Internet corporations that built a digital panopticon for us. In this prison, it is not necessary to be in one place, and no one feels the jerk of the jailer. The main thing in this new society of total control is to constantly stay on the network.

The cultural industry, as Adorno and Horkheimer described it, largely depended on other industries and was imprisoned to maintain the status quo. The current players in this field with their access to user data have even more power. They can affect the minds and behavior of users - and this effect is elusive and is not recorded in any way.

“While these tactics were noticeable, we could evaluate them, confront them and even laugh at them. Now everything is different, at least in the case of online services, ” writes journalist Nicholas Carr. - When companies can continuously control the flow of private correspondence and other personal or sensitive information, setting it secretly from us, we are not able to evaluate, but even to recognize manipulation. We find ourselves inside a black box. ”

Of course, the current Internet giants had predecessors. Let us recall how large companies imposed their products using the 25th frame in advertising. This was in the end forbidden. But will such a ban will be effective in the case of Google or Facebook ? Will we learn to control corporations and algorithms?