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The video ends by displaying a future vision of Russian expansion that includes most of Europe (notably not Turkey), the Middle East and Asia

According to Nox Influencer, Bright Side alone is earning between $314,010 and 971,950 monthly, and 5-Minute Crafts is earning between $576,640 and $1,780,000 monthly through YouTube partner earning estimates. As a privately held company, TheSoul Publishing doesn’t have to disclose its earnings. But all the Cypriot-managed company has to do to earn money from YouTube is meet viewing thresholds and have an AdSense account. AdSense, a Google product, just requires that a company have a bank account, an email address and a phone number. To monetize to this magnitude of revenue, YouTube may have also collected tax information, if TheSoul Publishing organization is conducting what it defines as “U.S. activities.” It’s also possible that YouTube verified a physical address by sending a pin mailer.

According to publicly available information from the YouTube channels themselves—information provided to YouTube by the people who set up and operate the channels at TheSoul Publishing—as of August 2019, 21 of the 35 channels connected to TheSoul Publishing claim to be based in the U.S. Ten of the channels had no country listed. Zodiac Maniac was registered in the U.K, though TheSoul Publishing emphasizes that all of its operations are run out of Cyprus.

 Now I’ve Seen Everything was the only channel registered in the Russian Federation. That channel has more than 400 million views, which, according to the analytics tool Nox Influencer, come from a range of countries, including Russia and Eastern European and Central Asian countries—despite being an English-language channel

In another video on Smart Banana, which has more than 1 million views, the titular banana speculates on “12 Countries That May Not Survive the Next 20 Years”—including the United States, which the video argues may collapse because of political infighting and diverse political viewpoints

Facebook pages are not a direct way to increase profit unless a company is actively marketing merchandise or sales, which TheSoul Publishing does not appear to do. The pages coordinate posting, so one post will often appear on a number of different pages. To a digital advertiser, this makes perfect sense as a way to increase relevance and visibility, but it’s far from obvious what TheSoul Publishing might be advertising. Likewise, there’s no obvious financial benefit to posting original videos within Facebook. The company did not meaningfully clarify its Facebook strategy in response to questions on the subject.

Facebook forbids what it describes as “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” as its head of cybersecurity describes in this video. While TheSoul’s Publishing’s behavior is clearly coordinated, it is unclear that any of its behavior is inauthentic based on information I have reviewed.

One thing that TheSoul is definitely doing on Facebook, however, is buying ads—and, at least sometimes, it’s doing so in rubles on issues of national importance, targeting audiences in the United States. The page Bright Side has 44 million followers and currently lists no account administrators located in the United States, but as of Aug. 8, 2019, it had them in Cyprus, Russia, the United Kingdom, El Salvador, India, Ukraine and in locations “Not Available.” It used Facebook to post six political advertisements paid for in the Russian currency.

the point here is not that the ad buy is significant in and of itself. The point, rather, is that the company has developed a massive social media following and has a history of at least experimenting with distributing both pro-Russian and paid political content to that following

TheSoul’s political ads included the one below. The advertisement pushes viewers to an article about how “wonderful [it is] that Donald Trump earns less in a year than you do in a month.” The advertisement reached men, women, and people of unknown genders over the ages of 18, and began running on May 15, 2018. TheSoul Publishing spent less than a dollar on this advertisement, raising the question: why bother advertising at all?

citizens of What Not are ranked based on their intelligence from A to C3 and can’t marry or procreate with someone of the same rank to ensure that intelligence is evenly distributed

Brave New World is more futuristic and preoccupied with technology than What Not. In Huxley’s world, procreation and education have become completely mechanized and emotions are strictly regulated pharmaceutically. Macaulay’s Britain is just the beginning of this process, and its characters are not yet completely indoctrinated into the new ways of the state—they resist it intellectually and question its endeavors, like the newly-passed Mental Progress Act. She writes:He did not like all this interfering, socialist what-not, which was both upsetting the domestic arrangements of his tenants and trying to put into their heads more learning than was suitable for them to have. For his part he thought every man had a right to be a fool if he chose, yes, and to marry another fool, and to bring up a family of fools too.

Where Huxley pairs dumb but pretty and “pneumatic” ladies with intelligent gentlemen, Macaulay’s work is decidedly less sexist.

We was published in French, Dutch, and German. An English version was printed and sold only in the US. When Orwell wrote about We in 1946, it was only because he’d managed to borrow a hard-to-find French translation.

While Orwell never indicated that he read Macaulay, he shares her subversive and subtle linguistic skills and satirical sense. His protagonist, Winston—like Kitty—works for the government in its Ministry of Truth, or Minitrue in Newspeak, where he rewrites historical records to support whatever Big Brother currently says is good for the regime. Macaulay would no doubt have approved of Orwell’s wit. And his state ministries bear a striking similarity to those she wrote about in What Not.

Orwell was familiar with Huxley’s novel and gave it much thought before writing his own blockbuster. Indeed, in 1946, before the release of 1984, he wrote a review of Zamyatin’s We (pdf), comparing the Russian novel with Huxley’s book. Orwell declared Huxley’s text derivative, writing in his review of We in The Tribune:The first thing anyone would notice about We is the fact—never pointed out, I believe—that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it. Both books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanized, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about six hundred years hence. The atmosphere of the two books is similar, and it is roughly speaking the same kind of society that is being described, though Huxley’s book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by recent biological and psychological theories.

In We, the story is told by D-503, a male engineer, while in Brave New World we follow Bernard Marx, a protagonist with a proper name. Both characters live in artificial worlds, separated from nature, and they recoil when they first encounter people who exist outside of the state’s constructed and controlled cities.

Although We is barely known compared to Orwell and Huxley’s later works, I’d argue that it’s among the best literary science fictions of all time, and it’s highly relevant, as it was when first written. Noam Chomsky calls it “more perceptive” than both 1984 and Brave New World. Zamyatin’s futuristic society was so on point, he was exiled from the Soviet Union because it was such an accurate description of life in a totalitarian regime, though he wrote it before Stalin took power.

Macaulay’s work is more subtle and funny than Huxley’s. Despite being a century old, What Not is remarkably relevant and readable, a satire that only highlights how little has changed in the years since its publication and how dangerous and absurd state policies can be. In this sense then, What Not reads more like George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984 

Orwell was critical of Zamyatin’s technique. “[We] has a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarize,” he wrote. Still, he admired the work as a whole. “[Its] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism—human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes—[…] makes Zamyatin’s book superior to Huxley’s,”

Like our own tech magnates and nations, the United State of We is obsessed with going to space.

Perhaps in 2019 Macaulay’s What Not, a clever and subversive book, will finally get its overdue recognition.

Media companies using this technology claim it is now possible for the “mood” of the reader or viewer to be tracked in real time and the content of the advertising to be changed accordingly

ads targeted at readers based on their predicted moods rather than their previous behaviour improved the click-through rate by 40%.

Given that the average click through rate (the number of times anyone actually clicks on an ad) is about 0.4%, this number (in gross terms) is probably less impressive than it sounds.

Cambridge Analytica, the company that misused Facebook data and, according to its own claims, helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election, used psychographic segmentation.

For many years “contextual” ads served by not very intelligent algorithms were the bane of digital editors’ lives. Improvements in machine learning should help eradicate the horrible business of showing insurance advertising to readers in the middle of an article about a devastating fire.

The words “brand safety” are increasingly used by publishers when demonstrating products such as Project Feels. It is a way publishers can compete on micro-targeting with platforms such as Facebook and YouTube by pointing out that their targeting will not land you next to a conspiracy theory video about the dangers of chemtrails.

the exploitation of psychographics is not limited to the responsible and transparent scientists at the NYT. While publishers were showing these shiny new tools to advertisers, Amazon was advertising for a managing editor for its surveillance doorbell, Ring, which contacts your device when someone is at your door. An editor for a doorbell, how is that going to work? In all kinds of perplexing ways according to the ad. It’s “an exciting new opportunity within Ring to manage a team of news editors who deliver breaking crime news alerts to our neighbours. This position is best suited for a candidate with experience and passion for journalism, crime reporting, and people management.” So if instead of thinking about crime articles inspiring fear and advertising doorbells in the middle of them, what if you took the fear that the surveillance-device-cum-doorbell inspires and layered a crime reporting newsroom on top of it to make sure the fear is properly engaging?

The media has arguably already played an outsized role in making sure that people are irrationally scared, and now that practice is being strapped to the considerably more powerful engine of an Amazon product.

This will not be the last surveillance-based newsroom we see. Almost any product that produces large data feeds can also produce its own “news”. Imagine the Fitbit newsroom or the managing editor for traffic reports from dashboard cams – anything that has a live data feed emanating from it, in the age of the Internet of Things, can produce news.

Gingrich subsequently secured a job for Pournelle’s son with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher in 1994, who like Gingrich is now a stalwart space booster and Trump supporter.

What Trump does is less important than the fact that he kicks over the table, strengthening America’s military state while demolishing bureaucracy and ignoring niceties. Democracy and law matter less than security and innovation

In their science fiction as in life, Gingrich and Pournelle shared an optimistic belief in power of technology—and an equally powerful insistence on the inevitability of conflict. They believed this required a robust, authoritarian state apparatus to preserve order and bind citizens together. Indeed, while backing Reagan, Gingrich had promoted a techno-futurism that was less conservative than it was authoritarian: he called for pruning inefficiency while aggressively promoting expansion and military technology. For his part, Pournelle published anthologies of science-fiction and techno-military essays through the 1980s under the name There Will Be War.

Gingrich and Pournelle’s enthusiasm had less to do with Trump’s particular ambitions than with his capacity for destruction of the status quo. Much of the chaos Trump foments is, to Gingrich and Pournelle, a key feature to induce the future they want—the one where the feminists and “eco-terrorists” and university professors are soundly defeated

with communism a fading threat by the late 80’s, Gingrich shifted his focus to the specter of a new enemy, arguing in 1989 that “Islamic extremism may well be the greatest threat to Western values and Western security in the world.” Such fear-mongering—Islamic extremism remains a fraction as destructive as the nuclear Soviet Union—may seem ill-suited to optimism in mankind’s future, but as a political project it can be uncannily effective. Pournelle wrote that Islam demands adherence to a principle of “Islam or the sword,” and that an aggressive military response is not only justified but demanded: we are at war with the Caliphate.

No science-fiction writer since has exerted as significant a political influence as Pournelle. But Pournelle does have a spiritual successor in Castalia House, the independent science-fiction publisher run by white nationalist Theodore Beale, aka Vox Day. Beale, like Gingrich, has said that his job is to save Western Civilization—and that it is in dire need of saving. Beale, however, is far more explicit about race.

Pournelle has dissociated himself from Beale’s politics, but Castalia House’s republishing of Pournelle’s 1980s There Will Be War series (as well as publishing a new volume 10) is no mere coincidence. Rather, they are indications of a shared worldview. To these writers, civil rights, equality, and civil liberties are irritants and impediments to progress at best. At worst, they are impositions on the holy forces of the market and social Darwinism (“evolution in action”) that sort out the best from the rest. And to all of them, the best tend to be white (with a bit of space for “the good ones” of other races). If there has been a shift in thought between the 1970s and today, it’s that the expected separation of wheat from chaff hasn’t taken place, and so now more active measures need to be taken—building the border walls and deportations, for example. Trump is an agent of these active measures—an agent of revolution, or at least the destruction that precedes a revolution.

Trump was far from the first to eliminate the line between right-wing thought and outright bigotry.

One of the gloomiest assessments comes from a team of British and South African economists who say that a vast effort must be made in agricultural research to create a new green revolution, but that seven multinational corporations, led by Monsanto, now dominate the global technology field.

a threat to the global commons in agricultural technology on which the green revolution has depended

Up to 70% of the energy needed to grow and supply food at present is fossil-fuel based which in turn contributes to climate change

The 21 papers published today in a special open access edition of the philosophical transactions of the royalsociety.org are part of a UK government Foresight study on the future of the global food industry. The final report will be published later this year in advance of the UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.

((via @russelldavies from his post here.))

Advertising is probably the worst kind of SciFi in this regard. No integrity. No expectations that what is being presented has any relationship to possibility. Maybe SciFi as it was has switched places with advertising: Warren Ellis says SciFi does extrapolation. Advertising-as-SciFi does..what? Dishonest predicting?

Making a buck from the alt-right is quite simple. Get a blog or a YouTube channel. Then under the guise of political dialogue or pseudo-science, start spouting hate speech. You'll soon find followers flocking to your banner.

Publish a crappy ebook explaining why SJWs Always Lie. Or teach your followers how to “think like a silverback gorilla” (surely an arena where the far right already triumph?) via a pricey seminar. Launch a Kickstarter for a badly drawn comic packed with anti-diversity propaganda. They'll sell by the bucketload to followers eager to virtue-signal their membership in the rank and file of the alt-right

the seemingly bottomless reservoirs of white male victimhood

nowhere is there a better supply of the credulous than among the angry white men who flock to the far right. Embittered by their own life failures, the alt-right follower is eager to believe they have a genetically superior IQ and are simply the victim of a libtard conspiracy to keep them down

We're barely in the foothills of the mountains of madness that the internet and social media are unleashing into our political process. If you think petty demagogues like Jordan Peterson are good at milking cash from the crowd, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Because he was just the beginning – and his ideology of the white male victim is rapidly spiralling into something that even he can no longer control

reflecting seriously on the societal context of a research position may prompt a scientist to accept the job—and to take it upon herself or himself to help restrain unthinking innovation at work, by raising questions about whether every feature that can be added should in fact be implemented. (The same goes for whether certain lines of research should be pursued and particular findings published.)

The challenge for each of us, moving forward, is to ask ourselves and one another, hopefully far earlier in the research process than did Germany’s Walther Gerlach: “What are we working for?”

Some argue that there is power in narrative stories that can’t be found elsewhere. Others assert that in our quest for imagination and prediction, we’re deluding ourselves into thinking that we can predict what’s coming

The World Future Society and the Association of Professional Futurists represent a small but growing group of professionals, many of whom have decades of experience thinking about long-term strategy and “scenario planning”—a method used by organizations to try and prepare for possible futures.

true Futurism is often pretty unsexy. It involves sifting through a lot of data and research and models and spreadsheets. Nobody is going to write a profile of your company or your government project based on a dry series of models outlining carefully caveated possibilities. On the other hand, worldbuilding—the process of imagining a universe in which your fictional stories can exist—is fun. People want stories, and science fiction writers can provide them.

Are those who write epic space operas (no matter how good those space operas might be) really the right people to ask about the future of work or water policy or human rights?

critics worry that writers are so good at spinning stories that they might even convince you those stories are true. In actuality, history shows us that predictions are nearly impossible to make and that humans are catastrophically bad at guessing what the future will hold

it's important to distinguish between prediction and impact. Did Star Trek anticipate the cell phone, or were the inventors of the cell phone inspired by Star Trek? Listicles of “all the things sci-fi has predicted” are largely exercises in cherry picking—they never include the things that sci-fi got wrong

In this line of work, specifics matter. It’s one thing to write a book about a refugee crisis, but quite another to predict exactly how the Syrian refugee crisis unfolded

It’s tempting to turn to storytelling in times of crisis—and it’s hard to argue that we’re not in a time of crisis now. Within dystopian pieces of fiction there are heroes and survivors, characters we can identify with who come out the other side and make it out OK. Companies and governments and individuals all want to believe that they will be among those lucky few, the heroes of the story. And science fiction writers can deliver that, for a fee.

the spread of persistent surveillance technologies is particularly worrisome because they remove any limit on how much information police can gather on a person’s movements. “The border is the natural place for the government to start using them, since there is much more public support to deploy these sorts of intrusive technologies there,”

the company’s ultimate goal is to build a “layer” of electronic surveillance equipment across the entire perimeter of the U.S. “Over time, we’ll expand not only to the northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country,”

In addition to fixed and mobile surveillance towers, other technology that CBP has acquired and deployed includes blimps outfitted with high-powered ground and air radar, sensors buried underground, and facial recognition software at ports of entry. CBP’s drone fleet has been described as the largest of any U.S. agency outside the Department of Defense

Nellie Jo David, a Tohono O’odham tribal member who is writing her dissertation on border security issues at the University of Arizona, says many younger people who have been forced by economic circumstances to work in nearby cities are returning home less and less, because they want to avoid the constant surveillance and harassment. “It’s especially taken a toll on our younger generations.”

Border militarism has been spreading worldwide owing to neoliberal economic policies, wars, and the onset of the climate crisis, all of which have contributed to the uprooting of increasingly large numbers of people, notes Reece Jones

In the U.S., leading companies with border security contracts include long-established contractors such as Lockheed Martin in addition to recent upstarts such as Anduril Industries, founded by tech mogul Palmer Luckey to feed the growing market for artificial intelligence and surveillance sensors — primarily in the borderlands. Elbit Systems has frequently touted a major advantage over these competitors: the fact that its products are “field-proven” on Palestinians

Verlon Jose, then-tribal vice chair, said that many nation members calculated that the towers would help dissuade the federal government from building a border wall across their lands. The Tohono O’odham are “only as sovereign as the federal government allows us to be,”

Leading Democrats have argued for the development of an ever-more sophisticated border surveillance state as an alternative to Trump’s border wall. “The positive, shall we say, almost technological wall that can be built is what we should be doing,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in January. But for those crossing the border, the development of this surveillance apparatus has already taken a heavy toll. In January, a study published by researchers from the University of Arizona and Earlham College found that border surveillance towers have prompted migrants to cross along more rugged and circuitous pathways, leading to greater numbers of deaths from dehydration, exhaustion, and exposure.

“Walls are not only a question of blocking people from moving, but they are also serving as borders or frontiers between where you enter the surveillance state,” she said. “The idea is that at the very moment you step near the border, Elbit will catch you. Something similar happens in Palestine.”

CBP is by far the largest law enforcement entity in the U.S., with 61,400 employees and a 2018 budget of $16.3 billion — more than the militaries of Iran, Mexico, Israel, and Pakistan. The Border Patrol has jurisdiction 100 miles inland from U.S. borders, making roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population theoretically subject to its operations, including the entirety of the Tohono O’odham reservation

Between 2013 and 2016, for example, roughly 40 percent of Border Patrol seizures at immigration enforcement checkpoints involved 1 ounce or less of marijuana confiscated from U.S. citizens.

the agency uses its sprawling surveillance apparatus for purposes other than border enforcement

documents obtained via public records requests suggest that CBP drone flights included surveillance of Dakota Access pipeline protests

CBP’s repurposing of the surveillance tower and drones to surveil dissidents hints at other possible abuses. “It’s a reminder that technologies that are sold for one purpose, such as protecting the border or stopping terrorists — or whatever the original justification may happen to be — so often get repurposed for other reasons, such as targeting protesters.”

The impacts of the U.S. border on Tohono O’odham people date to the mid-19th century. The tribal nation’s traditional land extended 175 miles into Mexico before being severed by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, a U.S. acquisition of land from the Mexican government. As many as 2,500 of the tribe’s more than 30,000 members still live on the Mexican side. Tohono O’odham people used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily on roads without checkpoints to visit family, perform ceremonies, or obtain health care. But that was before the Border Patrol arrived en masse in the mid-2000s, turning the reservation into something akin to a military occupation zone. Residents say agents have administered beatings, used pepper spray, pulled people out of vehicles, shot two Tohono O’odham men under suspicious circumstances, and entered people’s homes without warrants. “It is apartheid here,” Ofelia Rivas says. “We have to carry our papers everywhere. And everyone here has experienced the Border Patrol’s abuse in some way.”

Tohono O’odham people have developed common cause with other communities struggling against colonization and border walls. David is among numerous activists from the U.S. and Mexican borderlands who joined a delegation to the West Bank in 2017, convened by Stop the Wall, to build relationships and learn about the impacts of Elbit’s surveillance systems. “I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you look at what’s going on in Palestine — they’re bringing the same thing right over here to this land,” she says. “The U.S. government is going to be able to surveil basically anybody on the nation.”

Some parents said they were alarmed and frightened by schools’ new monitoring technologies. Others said they were conflicted, seeing some benefits to schools watching over what kids are doing online, but uncertain if their schools were striking the right balance with privacy concerns. Many said they were not even sure what kind of surveillance technology their schools might be using, and that the permission slips they had signed when their kids brought home school devices had told them almost nothing

“They’re so unclear that I’ve just decided to cut off the research completely, to not do any of it.”

As of 2018, at least 60 American school districts had also spent more than $1m on separate monitoring technology to track what their students were saying on public social media accounts, an amount that spiked sharply in the wake of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive advocacy group that compiled and analyzed school contracts with a subset of surveillance companies.

“They are all mandatory, and the accounts have been created before we’ve even been consulted,” he said. Parents are given almost no information about how their children’s data is being used, or the business models of the companies involved. Any time his kids complete school work through a digital platform, they are generating huge amounts of very personal, and potentially very valuable, data. The platforms know what time his kids do their homework, and whether it’s done early or at the last minute. They know what kinds of mistakes his kids make on math problems.

Felix, now 12, said he is frustrated that the school “doesn’t really [educate] students on what is OK and what is not OK. They don’t make it clear when they are tracking you, or not, or what platforms they track you on. “They don’t really give you a list of things not to do,” he said. “Once you’re in trouble, they act like you knew.”

“It’s the school as panopticon, and the sweeping searchlight beams into homes, now, and to me, that’s just disastrous to intellectual risk-taking and creativity.”

Many parents also said that they wanted more transparency and more parental control over surveillance. A few years ago, Ben, a tech professional from Maryland, got a call from his son’s principal to set up an urgent meeting. His son, then about nine or 10-years old, had opened up a school Google document and typed “I want to kill myself.” It was not until he and his son were in a serious meeting with school officials that Ben found out what happened: his son had typed the words on purpose, curious about what would happen. “The smile on his face gave away that he was testing boundaries, and not considering harming himself,” Ben said. (He asked that his last name and his son’s school district not be published, to preserve his son’s privacy.) The incident was resolved easily, he said, in part because Ben’s family already had close relationships with the school administrators.

there is still no independent evaluation of whether this kind of surveillance technology actually works to reduce violence and suicide.

Certain groups of students could easily be targeted by the monitoring more intensely than others, she said. Would Muslim students face additional surveillance? What about black students? Her daughter, who is 11, loves hip-hop music. “Maybe some of that language could be misconstrued, by the wrong ears or the wrong eyes, as potentially violent or threatening,” she said.

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy was founded in 2014, in the wake of parental outrage over the attempt to create a standardized national database that would track hundreds of data points about public school students, from their names and social security numbers to their attendance, academic performance, and disciplinary and behavior records, and share the data with education tech companies. The effort, which had been funded by the Gates Foundation, collapsed in 2014 after fierce opposition from parents and privacy activists.

“More and more parents are organizing against the onslaught of ed tech and the loss of privacy that it entails. But at the same time, there’s so much money and power and political influence behind these groups,”

some privacy experts – and students – said they are concerned that surveillance at school might actually be undermining students’ wellbeing

“I do think the constant screen surveillance has affected our anxiety levels and our levels of depression.” “It’s over-guarding kids,” she said. “You need to let them make mistakes, you know? That’s kind of how we learn.”

the risk of trusting competition to an interoperability mandate is that it will create a new ecosystem where everything that's not forbidden is mandatory, freezing in place the current situation, in which Facebook and the other giants dominate and new entrants are faced with onerous compliance burdens that make it more difficult to start a new service, and limit those new services to interoperating in ways that are carefully designed to prevent any kind of competitive challenge

Facebook is a notorious opponent of adversarial interoperability. In 2008, Facebook successfully wielded a radical legal theory that allowed it to shut down Power Ventures, a competitor that allowed Facebook's users to use multiple social networks from a single interface. Facebook argued that by allowing users to log in and display Facebook with a different interface, even after receipt of a cease and desist letter telling Power Ventures to stop, the company had broken a Reagan-era anti-hacking law called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). In other words, upsetting Facebook's investors made their conduct illegal.

Today, Facebook is viewed as holding all the cards because it has corralled everyone who might join a new service within its walled garden. But legal reforms to safeguard the right to adversarial interoperability would turn this on its head: Facebook would be the place that had conveniently organized all the people whom you might tempt to leave Facebook, and even supply you with the tools you need to target those people.

Such a tool would allow someone to use Facebook while minimizing how they are used by Facebook. For people who want to leave Facebook but whose friends, colleagues or fellow travelers are not ready to join them, a service like this could let Facebook vegans get out of the Facebook pool while still leaving a toe in its waters.

In a competitive market (which adversarial interoperability can help to bring into existence), even very large companies can't afford to enrage their customers

the audience for a legitimate adversarial interoperability product are the customers of the existing service that it connects to.

anyone using a Facebook mobile app might be exposing themselves to incredibly intrusive data-gathering, including some surprisingly creepy and underhanded tactics.

If users could use a third-party service to exchange private messages with friends, or to participate in a group they're a member of, they can avoid much (but not all) of this surveillance.

Facebook users (and even non-Facebook users) who want more privacy have a variety of options, none of them very good. Users can tweak Facebook's famously hard-to-understand privacy dashboard to lock down their accounts and bet that Facebook will honor their settings (this has not always been a good bet). Everyone can use tracker-blockers, ad-blockers and script-blockers to prevent Facebook from tracking them when they're not on Facebook, by watching how they interact with pages that have Facebook "Like" buttons and other beacons that let Facebook monitor activity elsewhere on the Internet. We're rightfully proud of our own tracker blocker, Privacy Badger, but it doesn't stop Facebook from tracking you if you have a Facebook account and you're using Facebook's service.

As Facebook's market power dwindled, so would the pressure that web publishers feel to embed Facebook trackers on their sites, so that non-Facebook users would not be as likely to be tracked as they use the Web.

Today, Facebook's scandals do not trigger mass departures from the service, and when users do leave, they tend to end up on Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook.

For users who have privacy needs -- and other needs -- beyond those the big platforms are willing to fulfill, it's important that we keep the door open to competitors (for-profit, nonprofit, hobbyist and individuals) who are willing to fill those needs.

helping Facebook's own users, or the users of any big service, to configure their experience to make their lives better should be legal and encouraged even (and especially) if it provides a path for users to either diversify their social media experience or move away entirely from the big, concentrated services. Either way, we'd be on our way to a more pluralistic, decentralized, diverse Internet