The Public Square Project

Reimagining Our Digital Future

Peter Lewis, Jordan Guiao

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780522878271
• eBook ISBN: 9780522878288
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Western democracy has always been anchored by the idea of a public space where people gather to share ideas, mediate difference and make sense of the world. When Facebook blocked Australian users from viewing or sharing news in 2021, it sounded the alarm worldwide on our growing reliance on global tech companies to fulfil this critical role in a digital world. Facebook's hostile act, constituting a very real threat to participatory democracy, was a direct response to government attempts to regulate Big Tech's advertising monopoly and to mediate its impact on public interest journalism. The conflict sparked a new sense of urgency around the growing movement to imagine alternative digital spaces that operate in the public interest rather than simply for a commercial bottom line. Can we create sustainable media models to help us tackle society's problems? Can we engender a civic platform built on facts and civility? Can we control the power of our data and use it to promote the common good? The Public Square Project draws together leading tech scholars, industry experts, writers and activists to chart a path towards a public square worthy of the name.

Section 1
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Destruction

Chapter 1
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Premonitions

A short history of the work of being watched

Mark Andrejevic

Artists are often the first to explore the potential of novel media technology, and back in the early web days of the 1990s, interactive media proved an exciting realm of aesthetic innovation and experimentation. At the time, as a journalist making the transition to academia, I was intrigued by the promise of digital interactivity to transform the relationship between creator and audience—a promise that paralleled that of media ‘democratisation’ heralded by the crew at Wired magazine and other proselytisers of the digital revolution.

The web in those days was a lot clunkier (and slower), but also full of interesting and endearing experiments that would eventually be bulldozed by the commercial juggernauts and displaced by the attention-seekers, self-promoters and trolls relentlessly amplified by their algorithms. Which is not to say there weren’t plenty of trolls back in the day, but they were not automatically mainlined straight into your commercial news feed. The whole thing was, in many ways, messier and harder to navigate—but full of the excitement of random discovery and unfulfilled potential. This was the moment that eventually came to feed a sense of nostalgia for the pre-platform era and its missed opportunities.

Picking up on the vibe of the moment, I explored the various hyper-text novels, interactive poems and collaborative online outworks that anticipated a future of shared creativity. Part of the appeal was the unfulfilled promise that the newfound ability to interact on a medium with potentially widespread distribution amounted to a collective seizure of the means of expression: capitalism delivering, in the end, on the radical promise to which it had so long seemed opposed.

This promise, although widely parroted by assorted futurists and pundits (culminating in Time magazine naming ‘you’—any representative member of the public—as its 2006 ‘Person of the Year’), seemed a bit too good to be true. All of which left me wondering what would happen when capitalism got a firm grip on the interactive potential that was springing up in some of the more avant-garde interstices of the web. The wonderful delusion of the artistic realm is that of relative autonomy from the killing floor of commerce—an autonomy that allows it to experiment with the possibilities of technological developments before these have become fully subordinated to the iron law of profit.

So, I found myself asking, in the late 1990s, what would happen to the promise of interactivity when it collided with the market imperatives—when it became fully integrated into the economy. This was how, relatively early on, I stumbled across the concept of what we now call surveillance capitalism—although I try to avoid using that term for reasons that will become clear over the course of this chapter. I started looking through the popular business literature at the time and came across the recurring buzzword ‘mass customisation’—which promised a high-tech return to the pre-mass era of custom-tailored production. The marketing of mass customisation invoked an explicit critique of the homogeneity of mass society. Why should we be satisfied with top-down designs for everything from the clothes we wear to the scheduling of our TV viewing time?

By contrast, new production infrastructures made it possible to tailor products and services in real time. All that was needed was data about consumers—lots of it. The promoters of mass customisation described the provision of this data as one of the duties of production that would have to be offloaded onto consumers themselves. The unsurprising coincidence, of course, was that at the very moment when producers wanted heaps more information about consumers, the internet provided a convenient infrastructure for mass data collection. The only challenge would be convincing consumers it was in their interest—and for their own good—to submit to increasingly comprehensive forms of monitoring.

Since the dawn of advertising both mass media and popular culture have had a central role to play in promoting the imperatives of consumer society—and the marketing of mass customisation was no exception. But, how would this message about the newfound convenience of surveillance be framed in popular culture? The answer was ready-to-hand in the late 1990s, which marked the surging popularity of a formerly niche genre that we now know as reality TV. Reality TV builds on the premise of mass customisation: that there are benefits to be gained from enlisting the promise of interactivity to offload important aspects of the production process onto consumers in the name of their own convenience and self-expression. It is a genre that puts the viewers to work—in part by recruiting cast members from the audience, and in part by getting them to shape the show (in ‘voting’ formats like Big Brother and the Idol franchises).

Reality TV is also a mass customised genre. The Big Brother format, for example, originated in the Netherlands, but has spawned fifty-five versions on six continents. Reality formats are also a great way to produce copious, cheap content because they offload the work of creating characters and dramas onto ‘real people’, who are often paid little or nothing for their contributions (with certain notable exceptions in the celebrity versions of the genre).

It is not necessarily a huge stretch to treat reality TV as a model for the online economy, insofar as it anticipates the rise of social media and the ‘democratisation’ of ego-casting upon which it relies. Perhaps its most significant contribution to this economy is its reframing of the portrayal of surveillance. The timely ideological trick of reality TV is summed up by its most famous franchise, which rehabilitates the figure of Big Brother, transforming it from a symbol of totalitarian surveillance to a figure of popular entertainment. I remember watching the premiere of the US version of the show when host Julie Chen gleefully pointed out the microphones in the bedposts and the cameras in the shower. These invasive and creepy forms of covert monitoring were portrayed as all in good fun. Thus, the lesson of reality TV aligned neatly with the emerging online economy: willing submission to comprehensive monitoring was framed as a form of self-empowerment and self-expression.

The equation of total exposure with self-expression and self-validation was not necessarily an obvious equation. Jon Murray, the co-creator of MTV’s popular TV franchise, The Real World, once told me during an interview that when he first tried to recruit college-aged participants for the show at laundromats and other locations near New York University, he had to deal with plenty of rejections. The idea of being filmed constantly—in return for only symbolic payment (free room and board and some gifts at the end of the season)—was not particularly appealing. After the show proved popular, however, Murray liked to boast that more people applied to be on the show each year than to Harvard.

Our habituation to perpetual monitoring eventually became the hallmark of the online economy, whereas the mass customisation—of news, entertainment, music, and culture more generally—became its mantra. Surveillance was marketed to us in the name of empowerment and what has become the tyranny of convenience. Google, like Jon Murray, discovered just how readily people will overcome their qualms about surveillance, when, instead of trying to get people to pay for its email service, it simply expanded the size of users’ free mailboxes in exchange for letting the company mine their messages for marketing information. There was some initial pushback—the creep factor echoed that of Big Brother ’s headboard microphones—but now it has become the way of the world, and Google has become the default email client for institutions public and private, including public universities and major media publications like The New York Times.

Against the background of these developments, it seems almost quaint to remember the days when we tried to keep brands out of the school in order to shelter impressionable minds from the machinations of the marketing industry. Now it passes almost without comment that we hand our kids over to Google’s suite of education tools at a tender age and placate them with advertising-studded videos on YouTube. It came as no particular surprise when my daughter’s school recommended that she sign up for an online maths game that collects and aggregates information about its users for marketing purposes.

Back in the late 1990s, I took seriously the insight gleaned from the business literature about how interactive infrastructures made it possible to offload some parts of the production process on to consumers—so seriously that I wrote a book about reality TV and the emerging online economy subtitled, ‘The Work of Being Watched’. At the time it seemed worthwhile pointing out that by surrendering our data and sharing our preferences, we were assisting in the work of marketing—to ourselves. Admittedly, this work is not waged (although there was a web browser back in those days that would provide micropayments to users who enabled a banner that would track their responses to a rotating set of ads)—but it was compensated in the form of access to online services like search engines and email.

In making the argument, I simply wanted to point out how the commercial capture of the internet cemented a model that made submission to monitoring a condition of access to a growing range of online activities and services. I called this process ‘digital enclosure’—the process whereby a growing range of our activities moved onto online platforms where they could be monitored and tracked. Observations like this were sufficiently novel at the turn of the millennium for colleagues to call me a practitioner of the paranoid style in the academy. In my first ever academic job interview, I was told I was exaggerating the role played by surveillance and monitoring in the online economy. However, by 2012, there had been something of a sea change—thanks in part to the rise of social media—and even the Wall Street Journal was writing about audience labour, describing Facebook’s users as the largest unpaid workforce in human history.

I have been invited, in recent years, to reflect on what drove me to buck the trend in the popular reception of digital media relatively early on by arguing that the promise of empowerment and participation was being repurposed as an alibi for mass monitoring. At the time, the popular and academic literature tended to focus on the emergence of new online communities, the creative possibilities opened up by the ability to experiment with online identity, and the forms of bottom-up empowerment that enabled ready access to media production and distribution. These assessments of the affordances of the technology had their elements of truth, but they tended to blur theory and practice: the difference between what the technology could do and what was actually happening. All I had done—along with others thinking about the political economy of digital media—was to consider how interactivity might be folded into the marketing logics they purportedly challenged. This is the familiar question with respect to capitalism—the depressing game to play: how will commercial capture rear its head out this time around?

In the early days of the new millennium, I thought I was being polemically pessimistic when I anticipated scenarios that have since become commonplace: the advent of hyper-targeted political advertising, the attempt to track people in physical space the way they are tracked online, the attempt to monitor and manipulate people’s moods, and so on. However, when I come across schemes to transform the entire physical world into a commercial ‘augmented reality’ platform or to monitor the physical movements of workers via blockchain, I suspect I was not pessimistic enough.

The widespread take-up of the term, ‘surveillance capitalism’, popularised by Shoshana Zuboff’s 2017 book of the same name, reflects the recent backlash against the growing power of the tech sector in the wake of concerns about its contribution to resurgent right-wing populism and the spread of misinformation online. It is a convenient way of describing the data-driven economy, but it is also a misleading one, insofar as it suggests that its two core components are in principle separable. Historically and conceptually, surveillance and capitalism are fully entwined. The wage labour contract depends upon supervision and contributed to the creation of physical spaces and management structures devoted to the detailed tracking and monitoring of workers. Similarly, creating markets for the avalanche of goods and services provided by industrial capitalism has long depended upon techniques for monitoring and stimulating consumption. In the early twentieth century, Archibald Crossley, who went on to pioneer the media ratings system, won an award from Harvard Business School for a market research scheme that offered free trash collection to selected households in order to search through their discarded packaging to see what they had been buying.

More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how important surveillance is to the workplace by highlighting the role of remote employee monitoring systems during lockdown. These systems approach the managerial fantasy of total monitoring by tracking keystroke activity and clocking the total amount of time spent away from the workstation. It is not a coincidence that Amazon relies on detailed monitoring of both consumers and employees to position itself as one of the wealthiest companies in the world. Data mining can be used to extract more labour from workers and more money, time and attention from consumers. All of which is to suggest that regulating capitalism and limiting surveillance go hand-in-hand.

The benefits of the digital economy are tremendous, but so is the concentration of economic and symbolic power it has enabled. This combination poses a novel challenge for democratic societies, which constantly struggle to contain the efforts of powerful corporations and wealthy individuals to capture and distort the political process. Our current moment is defined by the fact that these corporations are the same ones that shape the way we see, understand and talk about the world around us—including how best to respond to their impact on that world. The significance of this fact cannot be overstated: any attempt to imagine how we might organise to address the pathologies of the online economy will of necessity be mediated by the very platforms it seeks to challenge and transform. This is the trap we have built for ourselves—and it is conditioned by two defining elements: hyper-individualisation and untempered commercialism.

Social media platforms have received much of the blame for the rise of political polarisation—and they deserve their fair share. But they are building on commercial trends that long pre-date them. The rise of the multi-channel era via cable and then digital TV helped erode the conventions of mass-mediated centrism and catered increasingly to niche audiences. Similarly, commercial radio adjusted to competition with other forms of portable music listening by finding a core audience of elderly, white listeners drawn to right-wing talking heads. As the online information environment ramped up, commercial outlets developed strategies for cutting through the clutter by showcasing the most extreme and controversial content. Responding to an era of increasing economic inequality and dislocation associated with globalisation and neo-liberal policies, commercial outlets drove ratings by tapping into and exacerbating audience reservoirs of resentment, fear and anxiety. Into this mix, the tech platforms brought an unprecedented level of customisation and individuation—dismantling the shared experience of the mass media.

The consequences of hyper-individuation deserve more attention than they have received. The data-driven economy is not simply about targeting ads—it’s about fostering a fundamentally anti-civic culture. The message of mass customised news is that information about the world is not so much a matter of public interest as of personal taste, prejudice and preference. This version of reality obscures the underlying social ties that bind us together by prioritising the differences that distinguish us. These distinctions are emphasised by the online business model which relies on increasingly granular forms of social sorting to identify targets and isolate risks. For the purposes of advertising, policing, insurance and credit, the goal is to get as high-resolution a portrait of each individual as possible.

By contrast, the success of a democratic society relies on our willingness to place our differences in context—to understand the deep web of sociality that binds our interests to one another and makes it possible to come to a consensus understanding of the common good. We can see the dissolution of the social in the spate of populist individualism represented by rise of the anti-vaxxers, for example, who frame vaccination solely through the lens of individual choice and personal freedom. Their disavowal of collective goods ranging from public education and public healthcare to social welfare programs—and even mask wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic—is a common theme of the populist right whose profile and influence has surged on social media platforms. Their credo is that of an incoherent, absolutist individualism: any social claim made upon them is treated as a sign of oppression, including that of the social contract and its corollaries (paying taxes, wearing masks to protect against the spread of the virus, getting inoculated, and so on).

The abject failure of commercial social media platforms to foreground our shared sociality is structural: it is baked into their history and their commercial success. These platforms were not started as journalistic entities but as profit-driven technology platforms—they have none of the cultural DNA that might help them recognise the role played by the creation of an informed public in democratic societies. They have responded to criticism with token gestures towards the preservation of democracy and lip service paid to the notion of the public interest. Both of these civic concepts are in conflict with the imperatives of hyper-customisation and mass individuation that define Silicon Valley’s dominant business model. The greater the role these companies play in shaping our news and information environment, the more they threaten to erode the very sense of common cause and civic commitment that we need to rein them in.

This dynamic explains why even what looks like a win for Australia over the media bargaining code raises important concerns: the proffered solution to the reliance of social media platforms on news ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Big Tech vs Australia
• Section 1: Destruction
• Section 2: Regeneration
• Section 3: Reimagination
• Afterword: Onwards to new frontiers
• Further reading