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The Internet dramatically expands the scope of potential people that we can meet.

the widespread availability of pornography via the Internet has also led to an insidious change in attitudes about sex. One study found that more than a third of Americans had visited an online porn site at least once a month

There are other avenues still, said Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, the chief marketing officer of Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the popular Firefox browser, including advertisers and large tech platforms collecting vastly less user data and still effectively customizing ads to consumers.

The greatest likelihood is that the internet companies, frightened by the tumult, will accept a few more rules and work a little harder for transparency.

The Cambridge Analytica case, said Vera Jourova, the European Union commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality, was not just a breach of private data. “This is much more serious, because here we witness the threat to democracy, to democratic plurality,” she said.

Although many people had a general understanding that free online services used their personal details to customize the ads they saw, the latest controversy starkly exposed the machinery.

Consumers’ seemingly benign activities — their likes — could be used to covertly categorize and influence their behavior. And not just by unknown third parties. Facebook itself has worked directly with presidential campaigns on ad targeting, describing its services in a company case study as “influencing voters.”

“If your personal information can help sway elections, which affects everyone’s life and societal well-being, maybe privacy does matter after all.”

some trade group executives also warned that any attempt to curb the use of consumer data would put the business model of the ad-supported internet at risk.

“You’re undermining a fundamental concept in advertising: reaching consumers who are interested in a particular product,”

If suspicion of Facebook and Google is a relatively new feeling in the United States, it has been embedded in Europe for historical and cultural reasons that date back to the Nazi Gestapo, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and the Cold War.

“We’re at an inflection point, when the great wave of optimism about tech is giving way to growing alarm,” said Heather Grabbe, director of the Open Society European Policy Institute. “This is the moment when Europeans turn to the state for protection and answers, and are less likely than Americans to rely on the market to sort out imbalances.”

In May, the European Union is instituting a comprehensive new privacy law, called the General Data Protection Regulation. The new rules treat personal data as proprietary, owned by an individual, and any use of that data must be accompanied by permission — opting in rather than opting out — after receiving a request written in clear language, not legalese.

the protection rules will have more teeth than the current 1995 directive. For example, a company experiencing a data breach involving individuals must notify the data protection authority within 72 hours and would be subject to fines of up to 20 million euros or 4 percent of its annual revenue.

“With the new European law, regulators for the first time have real enforcement tools,” said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group in Washington. “We now have a way to hold these companies accountable.”

Privacy advocates and even some United States regulators have long been concerned about the ability of online services to track consumers and make inferences about their financial status, health concerns and other intimate details to show them behavior-based ads. They warned that such microtargeting could unfairly categorize or exclude certain people.

the Do Not Track effort and the privacy bill were both stymied.Industry groups successfully argued that collecting personal details posed no harm to consumers and that efforts to hinder data collection would chill innovation.

“If it can be shown that the current situation is actually a market failure and not an individual-company failure, then there’s a case to be made for federal regulation” under certain circumstances

The business practices of Facebook and Google were reinforced by the fact that no privacy flap lasted longer than a news cycle or two. Nor did people flee for other services. That convinced the companies that digital privacy was a dead issue.

If the current furor dies down without meaningful change, critics worry that the problems might become even more entrenched. When the tech industry follows its natural impulses, it becomes even less transparent.

“To know the real interaction between populism and Facebook, you need to give much more access to researchers, not less,” said Paul-Jasper Dittrich, a German research fellow

There’s another reason Silicon Valley tends to be reluctant to share information about what it is doing. It believes so deeply in itself that it does not even think there is a need for discussion. The technology world’s remedy for any problem is always more technology

I want to advance a technology-driven hypothesis: This mix of youthful safety and adult immaturity may be a feature of life in a society increasingly shaped by the internet’s virtual realities.

It is easy to see how online culture would make adolescent life less dangerous. Pornography to take the edge off teenage sexual appetite. Video games instead of fisticuffs or contact sports as an outlet for hormonal aggression. (Once it was feared that porn and violent media would encourage real-world aggression; instead they seem to be replacing it.) Sexting and selfie-enabled masturbation as a safer alternative to hooking up. Online hangouts instead of keggers in the field. More texting and driving, but less driving — one of the most dangerous teen activities — overall.

The question is whether this substitution is habit-forming and soul-shaping, and whether it extends beyond dangerous teen behavior to include things essential to long-term human flourishing — marriage, work, family, all that old-fashioned “meatspace” stuff.

It wasn’t so long ago that people worried about a digital divide, in which online access would be a luxury good that left the bottom half behind. But if anything, the virtual world looks more like an opiate for the masses

trends in the marketplace — ever-more-customized pornography, virtual realities that feel more and more immersive, devices and apps customized for addictive behavior — seem likely to overwhelm most attempts to enjoy the virtual only within limits.

Patricia Snow (yes, even columnists have mothers), in an essay for First Things earlier this year, suggested that any effective resistance to virtual reality’s encroachments would need to be moral and religious, not just pragmatic and managerial

Choosing the less-efficient way of doing something, especially things we do for pleasure, can help us reassess our relationship with time and forgo the constant need for productivity.

Following what it described as Meta’s unsatisfactory response to its complaints, Match began canceling Meta advertising for some of its apps, such as Tinder, in October. It has since halted all Reels advertising and stopped promoting its major brands on any of Meta’s platforms. “We have no desire to pay Meta to market our brands to predators or place our ads anywhere near this content,” said Match spokeswoman Justine Sacco.

The Journal set up the test accounts after observing that the thousands of followers of such young people’s accounts often include large numbers of adult men, and that many of the accounts who followed those children also had demonstrated interest in sex content related to both children and adults

The Journal also tested what the algorithm would recommend after its accounts followed some of those users as well, which produced more-disturbing content interspersed with ads.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a child-protection group, separately ran similar tests on its own, with similar results.

Meta said the Journal’s tests produced a manufactured experience that doesn’t represent what billions of users see. The company declined to comment on why the algorithms compiled streams of separate videos showing children, sex and advertisements, but a spokesman said that in October it introduced new brand safety tools that give advertisers greater control over where their ads appear, and that Instagram either removes or reduces the prominence of four million videos suspected of violating its standards each month. 

The Journal reported in June that algorithms run by Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, connect large communities of users interested in pedophilic content. The Meta spokesman said a task force set up after the Journal’s article has expanded its automated systems for detecting users who behave suspiciously, taking down tens of thousands of such accounts each month. The company also is participating in a new industry coalition to share signs of potential child exploitation.

“Our systems are effective at reducing harmful content, and we’ve invested billions in safety, security and brand suitability solutions,” said Samantha Stetson, a Meta vice president who handles relations with the advertising industry. She said the prevalence of inappropriate content on Instagram is low, and that the company invests heavily in reducing it.

Even before the 2020 launch of Reels, Meta employees understood that the product posed safety concerns, according to former employees.

Robbie McKay, a spokesman for Bumble, said it “would never intentionally advertise adjacent to inappropriate content,” and that the company is suspending its ads across Meta’s platforms.

Meta created Reels to compete with TikTok, the video-sharing platform owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. Both products feed users a nonstop succession of videos posted by others, and make money by inserting ads among them. Both companies’ algorithms show to a user videos the platforms calculate are most likely to keep that user engaged, based on his or her past viewing behavior

The Journal reporters set up the Instagram test accounts as adults on newly purchased devices and followed the gymnasts, cheerleaders and other young influencers. The tests showed that following only the young girls triggered Instagram to begin serving videos from accounts promoting adult sex content alongside ads for major consumer brands, such as one for Walmart that ran after a video of a woman exposing her crotch. 

When the test accounts then followed some users who followed those same young people’s accounts, they yielded even more disturbing recommendations. The platform served a mix of adult pornography and child-sexualizing material, such as a video of a clothed girl caressing her torso and another of a child pantomiming a sex act.

Experts on algorithmic recommendation systems said the Journal’s tests showed that while gymnastics might appear to be an innocuous topic, Meta’s behavioral tracking has discerned that some Instagram users following preteen girls will want to engage with videos sexualizing children, and then directs such content toward them.

Instagram’s system served jarring doses of salacious content to those test accounts, including risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos—and ads for some of the biggest U.S. brands.

Preventing the system from pushing noxious content to users interested in it, they said, requires significant changes to the recommendation algorithms that also drive engagement for normal users. Company documents reviewed by the Journal show that the company’s safety staffers are broadly barred from making changes to the platform that might reduce daily active users by any measurable amount.

The test accounts showed that advertisements were regularly added to the problematic Reels streams. Ads encouraging users to visit Disneyland for the holidays ran next to a video of an adult acting out having sex with her father, and another of a young woman in lingerie with fake blood dripping from her mouth. An ad for Hims ran shortly after a video depicting an apparently anguished woman in a sexual situation along with a link to what was described as “the full video.”

Current and former Meta employees said in interviews that the tendency of Instagram algorithms to aggregate child sexualization content from across its platform was known internally to be a problem. Once Instagram pigeonholes a user as interested in any particular subject matter, they said, its recommendation systems are trained to push more related content to them.

Part of the problem is that automated enforcement systems have a harder time parsing video content than text or still images. Another difficulty arises from how Reels works: Rather than showing content shared by users’ friends, the way other parts of Instagram and Facebook often do, Reels promotes videos from sources they don’t follow

In an analysis conducted shortly before the introduction of Reels, Meta’s safety staff flagged the risk that the product would chain together videos of children and inappropriate content, according to two former staffers. Vaishnavi J, Meta’s former head of youth policy, described the safety review’s recommendation as: “Either we ramp up our content detection capabilities, or we don’t recommend any minor content,” meaning any videos of children.

At the time, TikTok was growing rapidly, drawing the attention of Instagram’s young users and the advertisers targeting them. Meta didn’t adopt either of the safety analysis’s recommendations at that time, according to J.

Stetson, Meta’s liaison with digital-ad buyers, disputed that Meta had neglected child safety concerns ahead of the product’s launch. “We tested Reels for nearly a year before releasing it widely, with a robust set of safety controls and measures,” she said. 

After initially struggling to maximize the revenue potential of its Reels product, Meta has improved how its algorithms recommend content and personalize video streams for users

Among the ads that appeared regularly in the Journal’s test accounts were those for “dating” apps and livestreaming platforms featuring adult nudity, massage parlors offering “happy endings” and artificial-intelligence chatbots built for cybersex. Meta’s rules are supposed to prohibit such ads.

The Journal informed Meta in August about the results of its testing. In the months since then, tests by both the Journal and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection show that the platform continued to serve up a series of videos featuring young children, adult content and apparent promotions for child sex material hosted elsewhere. 

As of mid-November, the center said Instagram is continuing to steadily recommend what the nonprofit described as “adults and children doing sexual posing.”

Meta hasn’t offered a timetable for resolving the problem or explained how in the future it would restrict the promotion of inappropriate content featuring children. 

The Journal’s test accounts found that the problem even affected Meta-related brands. Ads for the company’s WhatsApp encrypted chat service and Meta’s Ray-Ban Stories glasses appeared next to adult pornography. An ad for Lean In Girls, the young women’s empowerment nonprofit run by former Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, ran directly before a promotion for an adult sex-content creator who often appears in schoolgirl attire. Sandberg declined to comment. 

Through its own tests, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection concluded that Instagram was regularly serving videos and pictures of clothed children who also appear in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s digital database of images and videos confirmed to be child abuse sexual material. The group said child abusers often use the images of the girls to advertise illegal content for sale in dark-web forums.

The nature of the content—sexualizing children without generally showing nudity—reflects the way that social media has changed online child sexual abuse, said Lianna McDonald, executive director for the Canadian center. The group has raised concerns about the ability of Meta’s algorithms to essentially recruit new members of online communities devoted to child sexual abuse, where links to illicit content in more private forums proliferate.

“Time and time again, we’ve seen recommendation algorithms drive users to discover and then spiral inside of these online child exploitation communities,” McDonald said, calling it disturbing that ads from major companies were subsidizing that process.

ThinkUp is something like Elf on the Shelf for digitally addled adults — a constant reminder that someone is watching you, and that you’re being judged.

“The goal is to make you act like less of a jerk online,” Ms. Trapani said. “The big goal is to create mindfulness and awareness, and also behavioral change.”

One of the biggest dangers is saying something off the cuff that might make sense in a particular context, but that sounds completely off the rails to the wider public. The problem, in other words, is acting without thinking — being caught up in the moment, without pausing to reflect on the long-term consequences. You’re never more than a few taps away from an embarrassment that might ruin your career, or at least your reputation, for years to come.

Because social networks often suggest a false sense of intimacy, they tend to lower people’s self-control.

Like a drug or perhaps a parasite, they worm into your devices, your daily habits and your every free moment, and they change how you think.Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

people often tweet and update without any perspective about themselves. That’s because Facebook and Twitter, as others have observed, have a way of infecting our brains.

For those of us most deeply afflicted, myself included, every mundane observation becomes grist for a 140-character quip, and every interaction a potential springboard into an all-consuming, emotionally wrenching flame battle.

getting a daily reminder from ThinkUp that there are good ways and bad ways to behave online — has a tendency to focus the mind.

More basically, though, it’s helped me pull back from social networks. Each week, ThinkUp tells me how often I’ve tweeted. Sometimes that number is terribly high — a few weeks ago it was more than 800 times — and I realize I’m probably overtaxing my followers

ThinkUp charges $5 a month for each social network you connect to it. Is it worth it? After all, there’s a better, more surefire way of avoiding any such long-term catastrophe caused by social media: Just stop using social networks.

even though “never tweet” became a popular, ironic thing to tweet this year, actually never tweeting, and never being on Facebook, is becoming nearly impossible for many people.

your online profile plays an important role in how you’re perceived by potential employers. In a recent survey commissioned by the job-hunting site CareerBuilder, almost half of companies said they perused job-seekers’ social networking profiles to look for red flags and to see what sort of image prospective employees portrayed online.

The main issue constraining growth, the founders say, is that it has been difficult to explain to people why they might need ThinkUp.

That may change as more people falter on social networks, either by posting unthinking comments that end up damaging their careers, or simply by annoying people to the point that their online presence becomes a hindrance to their real-life prospects.

searching the Internet can get you to information that would back up almost any claim of fact, no matter how unfounded. It is both the world’s best fact-checker and the world’s best bias confirmer — often at the same time.

Nor is it a coincidence that people are increasingly following the election on social media, using it both as the source of their information and as the way to get their view out. Consent is still being manufactured, but the manufacturing is being done willingly by us, usually intended for consumption by other people with whom we already agree, facts or no facts.

It really isn’t a surprise that Rubio would ask us to Google for certain facts; that’s how you and I know almost everything we know nowadays — it is a way of knowing that is so embedded into the very fabric of our lives that we don’t even notice it

The problem of course is that having more information available, even more accurate information, isn’t what is required by the ideal.

What is required is that people actually know and understand that information, and there are reasons to think we are no closer to an informed citizenry understood in that way than we ever have been. Indeed, we might be further away.

The worry is no longer about who controls content. It is about who controls the flow of that content.

the flow of digital information is just as prone to manipulation as its content

No wonder Trump and his followers on Twitter immediately shrugged off Rubio’s inconvenient truths; there is nothing to fear from information when counterinformation is just as plentiful.

The real worry concerns our faith in the ideal of an informed citizenry itself. That worry, as I see it, has two faces.

First, as Jason Stanley and others have emphasized recently, appeals to ideals can be used to undermine those very ideals.

The very availability of information can make us think that the ideal of the informed citizen is more realized than it is — and that, in turn, can actually undermine the ideal, making us less informed, simply because we think we know all we need to know already.

Second, the danger is that increasing recognition of the fact that Googling can get you wherever you want to go can make us deeply cynical about the ideal of an informed citizenry — for the simple reason that what counts as an “informed” citizen is a matter of dispute. We no longer disagree just over values. Nor do we disagree just over the facts. We disagree over whose source — whose fountain of facts — is the right one.

And once disagreement reaches that far down, the daylight of reason seems very far away indeed.

as Facebook evolves into a sustainable business, the trick will be making sure that users don’t cool on its tactics. That could be devastating to the company’s main source of revenue — showing advertisements to its members based on what it knows about them.

Facebook might not be impervious to rivals, or at least to more divided attention from people who shift their time to other parts of the Web where intent is easier to understand and the interactions feel less public.

In other words, people are doing their best to blend in with the crowd.

The challenge of achieving true anonymity, though, is that evading surveillance makes your behavior anomalous—and anomalies stick out. As the Japanese proverb says, "A nail that sticks out gets hammered down." Glenn Greenwald explained recently that simply using encryption can make you a target. For me, this was all the more motivation to disappear.

For those of us who feel confident that we have nothing to hide, the future of Internet security might not seem like a major concern. But we underestimate the many ways in which our online identities can be manipulated.

The U.S. Department of Defense has also figured out how influential Facebook and Twitter can be. In 2011, it announced a new “Social Media in Strategic Communication” (SMISC) program to detect and counter information the U.S. government deemed dangerous. “Since everyone is potentially an influencer on social media and is capable of spreading information,” one researcher involved in a SMISC study told The Guardian, “our work aims to identify and engage the right people at the right time on social media to help propagate information when needed.”

Private companies are also using personal information in hidden ways. They don’t simply learn our tastes and habits, offering us more of what want and less of what we don’t. As Michael Fertik wrote in a 2013 Scientific American article titled “The Rich See a Different Internet Than the Poor,” credit lenders have the ability to hide their offers from people who may need loans the most. And Google now has a patent to change its prices based on who’s buying. 

It is essentially impossible to achieve anonymity online. It requires a complete operational posture that extends from the digital to the physical. Downloading a secure messaging app and using Tor won’t all of a sudden make you “NSA-proof.” And doing it right is really, really hard.

Weighing these trade-offs in my day-to-day life led to a few behavioral changes, but I have a mostly normal relationship with the Internet—I deleted my Facebook account, I encrypt my emails whenever I can, and I use a handful of privacy minded browser extensions. But even those are steps many people are unwilling, or unable, to take.

he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.

Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.

The researchers recruited 520 undergraduates at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available working-memory capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.

In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.

In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.

In a 2013 study conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”

the “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.”

 Smartphones have become so entangled with our existence that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check our phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking.

They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.

A study of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.

Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well.

Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.

A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.

The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware o

 Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking — that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.”

even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings — and it is always part of our surroundings.

Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.

The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities that make it so appealing to us — its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability — are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.

Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours

Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said in a recent interview. “[We] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it’s not that simple.

As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores

In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers — led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner — had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.

Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it

The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”

as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.”

Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.

As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”

That insight sheds light on society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.

Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains

When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning

We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.

Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.

By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.

Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.

By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers

this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.

Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational byproducts of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms

internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms “extreme structural independence from people.” When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.

In January, Facebook threw a wrench into that media economy by changing its branded content policy to prohibit creators from accepting money for such link-sharing deals, and re-engineering its News Feed algorithms. Traffic to many viral publishers plummeted overnight. LittleThings, a female-focused digital publisher that had amassed more than 12 million Facebook followers, announced that it was shutting down and blamed Facebook’s News Feed changes for cratering its organic traffic.

“Partly, this project started because the current set of emojis set by some international board were limited and not evolving fast enough for us,” said Mr. Simkhai, who in certain ways fits the stereotype of a gay man in West Hollywood: a lithe, gym-fit, hairless nonsmoker who enjoys dancing at gay circuit parties.

Like most every other human in the developed world, they had their heads buried in their screens.

“We’re all so attached to our phones that when people talk about the notion of the computer melding with the human and ask when that’s going to happen, I say it already has,” Mr. Simkhai said. He added that the prospect of being deprived of a phone for 20 minutes induced in him “the highest level of anxiety I can possibly have.”

Gaymoji, then, serve as both conversational and even existential placeholders, Ms. McCulloch said: “You’re using them to say, ‘I’m still here and I still want to be talking to you.’”

As if to emphasized that assertion, a reporter combing through the new set of Gaymoji in search of something that would symbolize a person of Mr. Simkhai’s vintage could find only one.It was an image of a gray-haired daddy holding aloft a credit card.

we find information or misinformation “22 times more memorable in narrative form.”

It’s a contagion, and thanks to social media, or “participatory propaganda,” highly viral

The Fox News counternarrative model is as simple as it is cunning. The segment producer’s job is to get the answers to two questions: What is the most emotionally engaging story we have right now

The next question is, how do we construct a counternarrative that includes as many existing other believable meta-narratives as possible

The hunt for the killer narrative starts with the “Morning Memo” to the producers. It shares the interpretation from the vice president of news of the highest-trending articles on Foxnews.com and Drudge

The next move is to get a few Fox News contributor regulars — elected officials and paid pundits — not just to deliver the new counternarrative but also to wrap it inside an existing or new meta-narrative.

What do the ratings tell the producers are the most engaging meta-narratives for the over 80 million Fox News viewers on all digital platforms?

Conspiracy theories.

Why do people love conspiracy stories? It’s human behavior

The emotional payoff from being on the inside of a conspiracy is a self-esteem jolt that makes you feel smarter than your tribal foe and keeps your eyeballs glued to screens

Every successful Fox News segment producer has the conspiracy script down cold. These segments work best when the “proof” of a conspiracy against a tribal leader — in this case the Republican president — makes the viewer feel under attack as well

it helps when a proposed conservative thought leader mixes in the meta-narrative to the effect that “we are victimized again by the condescending Beltway elites.”

Believing in conspiracy theories is a psychological construct for people to take back some semblance of control in their lives. It inflates their sense of importance. It makes them feel they have access to “special knowledge” that the rest of the world is “too blind,” “too dumb” or “too corrupt” to understand.

this is like if Russell Moore came out and said that, on the whole, Christianity turns out to be a bad thing. It’s that big of a deal.

Thompson’s case centers around constraints and supply, particularly as they apply to content creation.

In the pre-internet days, creating and distributing content was relatively expensive, which placed content publishers—be they newspapers, or TV stations, or movie studios—high on the value chain.

The internet reduced distribution costs to zero and this shifted value away from publishers and over to aggregators: Suddenly it was more important to aggregate an audience—a la Google and Facebook—than to be a content creator.

Audiences were valuable; content was commoditized.

What has alarmed Thompson is that AI has now reduced the cost of creating content to zero.

what does the world look like when both the creation and distribution of content are zero?

Hellscape

We’re headed to a place where content is artificially created and distributed in such a way as to be tailored to a given user’s preferences. Which will be the equivalent of living in a hall of mirrors.

What does that mean for news? Nothing good.

It doesn’t really make sense to talk about “news media” because there are fundamental differences between publication models that are driven by scale.

So the challenges the New York Times face will be different than the challenges that NPR or your local paper face.

Two big takeaways:

(1) Ad-supported publications will not survive

Zero-cost for content creation combined with zero-cost distribution means an infinite supply of content. The more content you have, the more ad space exists—the lower ad prices go.

Actually, some ad-supported publications will survive. They just won’t be news. What will survive will be content mills that exist to serve ads specifically matched to targeted audiences.

(2) Size is determinative.

The New York Times has a moat by dint of its size. It will see the utility of its soft “news” sections decline in value, because AI is going to be better at creating cooking and style content than breaking hard news. But still, the NYT will be okay because it has pivoted hard into being a subscription-based service over the last decade.

At the other end of the spectrum, independent journalists should be okay. A lone reporter running a focused Substack who only needs four digits’ worth of subscribers to sustain them.

But everything in between? That’s a crapshoot.

Technology writers sometimes talk about the contrast between “builders” and “conservers” — roughly speaking, between those who are most animated by what we stand to gain from technology and those animated by what we stand to lose.

in our moment the builder and conserver types are proving quite mercurial. On issues ranging from Big Tech to medicine, human enhancement to technologies of governance, the politics of technology are in upheaval.

Dispositions are supposed to be basically fixed. So who would have thought that deep blue cities that yesterday were hotbeds of vaccine skepticism would today become pioneers of vaccine passports? Or that outlets that yesterday reported on science and tech developments in reverent tones would today make it their mission to unmask “tech bros”?

One way to understand this churn is that the builder and the conserver types each speak to real, contrasting features within human nature. Another way is that these types each pick out real, contrasting features of technology. Focusing strictly on one set of features or the other eventually becomes unstable, forcing the other back into view.

You can think of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter as the latest sortie, a takeover of the ultimate wordcel site by the world’s most successful shape rotator.

more likely, he fell prey to a different delusion, one in which the shape rotators and the wordcels are united: thinking of Twitter in terms of words and arguments, as a “digital public square” where vital questions are hashed out. It is that, sometimes, but that’s not what it’s designed for. It’s designed to maximize engagement, which is to say, it’s an addiction machine for the highly verbal.

Both groups theoretically understand what the machine is doing — the wordcels write endless articles about bad algorithms, and the shape rotators build them. But both nonetheless talk as though they’re saving the world even as they compulsively follow the programming. The shape rotators bait the wordcels because that’s what makes the machine spit out more rewarding likes and retweets. We wordcels return the favor for the same reason.

Musk could theoretically rework Twitter’s architecture to downrank provocation and make it less addictive. But of course, that would make it a less profitable business

More to the point, the reason he bought it is that he, like his critics, is hooked on it the way it is now. Unfortunately for Tesla shareholders, Musk has now put himself in the position of a dealer who can spend all day getting high on his own supply.

The social medium of choice for the self-absorbed appears to be Twitter. The researchers found an association between tweeting about oneself and high narcissism scores.

The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.

Stereotyping is alive and well in data aggregation. Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done

Data aggregators’ practices conflict with what people say they want. A 2008 Consumer Reports poll of 2,000 people found that 93 percent thought Internet companies should always ask for permission before using personal information, and 72 percent wanted the right to opt out of online tracking. A study by Princeton Survey Research Associates in 2009 using a random sample of 1,000 people found that 69 percent thought that the United States should adopt a law giving people the right to learn everything a Web site knows about them. We need a do-not-track law, similar to the do-not-call one. Now it’s not just about whether my dinner will be interrupted by a telemarketer. It’s about whether my dreams will be dashed by the collection of bits and bytes over which I have no control and for which companies are currently unaccountable.

The term Weblining describes the practice of denying people opportunities based on their digital selves. You might be refused health insurance based on a Google search you did about a medical condition. You might be shown a credit card with a lower credit limit, not because of your credit history, but because of your race, sex or ZIP code or the types of Web sites you visit.

Advertisers are drawing new redlines, limiting people to the roles society expects them to play

Even though laws allow people to challenge false information in credit reports, there are no laws that require data aggregators to reveal what they know about you. If I’ve Googled “diabetes” for a friend or “date rape drugs” for a mystery I’m writing, data aggregators assume those searches reflect my own health and proclivities. Because no laws regulate what types of data these aggregators can collect, they make their own rules.

LAST week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion. But unlike other big-ticket corporations, it doesn’t have an inventory of widgets or gadgets, cars or phones.

If you indicate that you like cupcakes, live in a certain neighborhood and have invited friends over, expect an ad from a nearby bakery to appear on your page.

The economics community just hasn't spent much time over the past couple of decades focusing on the effect that machine intelligence is likely to have on the labor marke

The Digital Revolution is different because computers can perform cognitive tasks too, and that means machines will eventually be able to run themselves. When that happens, they won't just put individuals out of work temporarily. Entire classes of workers will be out of work permanently. In other words, the Luddites weren't wrong. They were just 200 years too early

Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.

Robotic pets are growing so popular that Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies the way we interact with technology, is uneasy about it: "The idea of some kind of artificial companionship," she says, "is already becoming the new normal."

robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.

Economist Paul Krugman recently remarked that our long-standing belief in skills and education as the keys to financial success may well be outdated. In a blog post titled "Rise of the Robots," he reviewed some recent economic data and predicted that we're entering an era where the prime cause of income inequality will be something else entirely: capital vs. labor.

while it's easy to believe that some jobs can never be done by machines—do the elderly really want to be tended by robots?—that may not be true.

Third, as more people compete for fewer jobs, we'd expect to see middle-class incomes flatten in a race to the bottom.

The question we want to answer is simple: If CBTC is already happening—not a lot, but just a little bit—what trends would we expect to see? What are the signs of a computer-driven economy?

if automation were displacing labor, we'd expect to see a steady decline in the share of the population that's employed.

Second, we'd expect to see fewer job openings than in the past.

In the economics literature, the increase in the share of income going to capital owners is known as capital-biased technological change

Fourth, with consumption stagnant, we'd expect to see corporations stockpile more cash and, fearing weaker sales, invest less in new products and new factories

Fifth, as a result of all this, we'd expect to see labor's share of national income decline and capital's share rise.

We're already seeing them, and not just because of the crash of 2008. They started showing up in the statistics more than a decade ago. For a while, though, they were masked by the dot-com and housing bubbles, so when the financial crisis hit, years' worth of decline was compressed into 24 months. The trend lines dropped off the cliff.

Corporate executives should worry too. For a while, everything will seem great for them: Falling labor costs will produce heftier profits and bigger bonuses. But then it will all come crashing down. After all, robots might be able to produce goods and services, but they can't consume them

in another sense, we should be very alarmed. It's one thing to suggest that robots are going to cause mass unemployment starting in 2030 or so. We'd have some time to come to grips with that. But the evidence suggests that—slowly, haltingly—it's happening already, and we're simply not prepared for it.

the first jobs to go will be middle-skill jobs. Despite impressive advances, robots still don't have the dexterity to perform many common kinds of manual labor that are simple for humans—digging ditches, changing bedpans. Nor are they any good at jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill—teaching classes, writing magazine articles

in the middle you have jobs that are both fairly routine and require no manual dexterity. So that may be where the hollowing out starts: with desk jobs in places like accounting or customer support.

In fact, there's even a digital sports writer. It's true that a human being wrote this story—ask my mother if you're not sure—but in a decade or two I might be out of a job too

Doctors should probably be worried as well. Remember Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer? It's now being fed millions of pages of medical information so that it can help physicians do a better job of diagnosing diseases. In another decade, there's a good chance that Watson will be able to do this without any human help at all.

Take driverless cars.

The next step might be passenger vehicles on fixed routes, like airport shuttles. Then long-haul trucks. Then buses and taxis. There are 2.5 million workers who drive trucks, buses, and taxis for a living, and there's a good chance that, one by one, all of them will be displaced

There will be no place to go but the unemployment lin

we'll need to let go of some familiar convictions. Left-leaning observers may continue to think that stagnating incomes can be improved with better education and equality of opportunity. Conservatives will continue to insist that people without jobs are lazy bums who shouldn't be coddled. They'll both be wrong.

The modern economy is complex, and most of these trends have multiple causes.

we'll probably have only a few options open to us. The simplest, because it's relatively familiar, is to tax capital at high rates and use the money to support displaced workers. In other words, as The Economist's Ryan Avent puts it, "redistribution, and a lot of it."

would we be happy in a society that offers real work to a dwindling few and bread and circuses for the rest?

Most likely, owners of capital would strongly resist higher taxes, as they always have, while workers would be unhappy with their enforced idleness. Still, the ancient Romans managed to get used to it—with slave labor playing the role of robots—and we might have to, as well.

 economist Noah Smith suggests that we might have to fundamentally change the way we think about how we share economic growth. Right now, he points out, everyone is born with an endowment of labor by virtue of having a body and a brain that can be traded for income. But what to do when that endowment is worth a fraction of what it is today? Smith's suggestion: "Why not also an endowment of capital? What if, when each citizen turns 18, the government bought him or her a diversified portfolio of equity?"

In simple terms, if owners of capital are capturing an increasing fraction of national income, then that capital needs to be shared more widely if we want to maintain a middle-class society.

it's time to start thinking about our automated future in earnest. The history of mass economic displacement isn't encouraging—fascists in the '20s, Nazis in the '30s—and recent high levels of unemployment in Greece and Italy have already produced rioting in the streets and larger followings for right-wing populist parties. And that's after only a few years of misery.

When the robot revolution finally starts to happen, it's going to happen fast, and it's going to turn our world upside down. It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore. Like Lake Michigan with an inch of water in it, it's happening around us right now even if it's hard to see

A robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us, but we have a long and dimly lit tunnel to navigate before we get there.

It is not that the English language has ceased to be a precious possession; on the contrary, it is far more important now than it ever was in my childhood. But its importance has little or nothing to do any longer with the dream of rootedness. English is the premier international language, the global medium of communication and exchange.

as I have discovered in my teaching, it is a different Shakespeare from the one with whom I first fell in love. Many of my students may have less verbal acuity than in years past, but they often possess highly developed visual, musical and performative skills. They intuitively grasp, in a way I came to understand only slowly, the pervasiveness of songs in Shakespeare’s plays, the strange ways that his scenes flow one into another or the cunning alternation of close-ups and long views

When I ask them to write a 10-page paper analyzing a particular web of metaphors, exploring a complex theme or amassing evidence to support an argument, the results are often wooden; when I ask them to analyze a film clip, perform a scene or make a video, I stand a better chance of receiving something extraordinary.

This does not mean that I should abandon the paper assignment; it is an important form of training for a range of very different challenges that lie in their future. But I see that their deep imaginative engagement with Shakespeare, their intoxication, lies elsewhere.

The M.I.T. Global Shakespeare Project features an electronic archive that includes images of every page of the First Folio of 1623. In the Norton Shakespeare, which I edit, the texts of his plays are now available not only in the massive printed book with which I was initiated but also on a digital platform. One click and you can hear each song as it might have sounded on the Elizabethan stage; another click and you listen to key scenes read by a troupe of professional actors. It is a kind of magic unimagined even a few years ago or rather imaginable only as the book of a wizard like Prospero in ‘‘The Tempest.’

But it is not the new technology alone that attracts students to Shakespeare; it is still more his presence throughout the world as the common currency of humanity. In Taiwan, Tokyo and Nanjing, in a verdant corner of the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome and in an ancient garden in Kabul, in Berlin and Bangkok and Bangalore, his plays continue to find new and unexpected ways to enchant.