Scientists Are Getting Eerily Good at Using WiFi to 'See' People Through Walls in Detail

The signals from WiFi can be used to map a human body, according to a new paper.

January 17, 2023, 7:50pm

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a method for detecting the three dimensional shape and movements of human bodies in a room, using only WiFi routers.

To do this, they used DensePose, a system for mapping all of the pixels on the surface of a human body in a photo. DensePose was developed by London-based researchers and Facebook’s AI researchers. From there, according to their recently-uploaded preprint paper published on arXiv, they developed a deep neural network that maps WiFi signals’ phase and amplitude sent and received by routers to coordinates on human bodies.

Researchers have been working on “seeing” people without using cameras or expensive LiDAR hardware for years. In 2013, a team of researchers at MIT found a way to use cell phone signals to see through walls; in 2018, another MIT team used WiFi to detect people in another room and translate their movements to walking stick-figures.

The Carnegie Mellon researchers wrote that they believe WiFi signals “can serve as a ubiquitous substitute” for normal RGB cameras, when it comes to “sensing” people in a room. Using WiFi, they wrote, overcomes obstacles like poor lighting and occlusion that regular camera lenses face.

Interestingly, they position this advancement as progress in privacy rights; “In addition, they protect individuals’ privacy and the required equipment can be bought at a reasonable price,” they wrote. “In fact, most households in developed countries already have WiFi at home, and this technology may be scaled to monitor the well-being of elder people or just identify suspicious behaviors at home.”

They don’t mention what “suspicious behaviors” might include, if this technology ever hits the mainstream market. But considering companies like Amazon are trying to put Ring camera drones inside our houses, it’s easy to imagine how widespread WiFi-enabled human-detection could be a force for good—or yet another exploitation of all of our privacy.

Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore

The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over.

By Kyle Chayka October 9, 2023

Lately on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, my timeline is filled with vapid posts orbiting the same few topics like water whirlpooling down a drain. Last week, for instance, the chatter was dominated by talk of Taylor Swift’s romance with the football player Travis Kelce. If you tried to talk about anything else, the platform’s algorithmic feed seemed to sweep you into irrelevance. Users who pay for Elon Musk’s blue-check verification system now dominate the platform, often with far-right-wing commentary and outright disinformation; Musk rewards these users monetarily based on the engagement that their posts drive, regardless of their veracity. The decay of the system is apparent in the spread of fake news and mislabelled videos related to Hamas’s attack on Israel.

Elsewhere online, things are similarly bleak. Instagram’s feed pushes months-old posts and product ads instead of photos from friends. Google search is cluttered with junky results, and S.E.O. hackers have ruined the trick of adding “Reddit” to searches to find human-generated answers. Meanwhile, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, in its latest bid for relevance, is reportedly developing artificial-intelligence chatbots with various “sassy” personalities that will be added to its apps, including a role-playing D. & D. Dungeon Master based on Snoop Dogg. The prospect of interacting with such a character sounds about as appealing as texting with one of those spam bots that asks you if they have the right number.

The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over. The precipitous decline of X is the bellwether for a new era of the Internet that simply feels less fun than it used to be. Remember having fun online? It meant stumbling onto a Web site you’d never imagined existed, receiving a meme you hadn’t already seen regurgitated a dozen times, and maybe even playing a little video game in your browser. These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago. In large part, this is because a handful of giant social networks have taken over the open space of the Internet, centralizing and homogenizing our experiences through their own opaque and shifting content-sorting systems. When those platforms decay, as Twitter has under Elon Musk, there is no other comparable platform in the ecosystem to replace them. A few alternative sites, including Bluesky and Discord, have sought to absorb disaffected Twitter users. But like sproutlings on the rain-forest floor, blocked by the canopy, online spaces that offer fresh experiences lack much room to grow.

One Twitter friend told me, of the platform’s current condition, “I’ve actually experienced quite a lot of grief over it.” It may seem strange to feel such wistfulness about a site that users habitually referred to as a “hellsite.” But I’ve heard the same from many others who once considered Twitter, for all its shortcomings, a vital social landscape. Some of them still tweet regularly, but their messages are less likely to surface in my Swift-heavy feed. Musk recently tweeted that the company’s algorithm “tries to optimize time spent on X” by, say, boosting reply chains and downplaying links that might send people away from the platform. The new paradigm benefits tech-industry “thread guys,” prompt posts in the “what’s your favorite Marvel movie” vein, and single-topic commentators like Derek Guy, who tweets endlessly about menswear. Algorithmic recommendations make already popular accounts and subjects even more so, shutting out the smaller, more magpie-ish voices that made the old version of Twitter such a lively destination. (Guy, meanwhile, has received so much algorithmic promotion under Musk that he accumulated more than half a million followers.)

The Internet today feels emptier, like an echoing hallway, even as it is filled with more content than ever. It also feels less casually informative. Twitter in its heyday was a source of real-time information, the first place to catch wind of developments that only later were reported in the press. Blog posts and TV news channels aggregated tweets to demonstrate prevailing cultural trends or debates. Today, they do the same with TikTok posts—see the many local-news reports of dangerous and possibly fake “TikTok trends”—but the TikTok feed actively dampens news and political content, in part because its parent company is beholden to the Chinese government’s censorship policies. Instead, the app pushes us to scroll through another dozen videos of cooking demonstrations or funny animals. In the guise of fostering social community and user-generated creativity, it impedes direct interaction and discovery.

According to Eleanor Stern, a TikTok video essayist with nearly a hundred thousand followers, part of the problem is that social media is more hierarchical than it used to be. “There’s this divide that wasn’t there before, between audiences and creators,” Stern said. The platforms that have the most traction with young users today—YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch—function like broadcast stations, with one creator posting a video for her millions of followers; what the followers have to say to one another doesn’t matter the way it did on the old Facebook or Twitter. Social media “used to be more of a place for conversation and reciprocity,” Stern said. Now conversation isn’t strictly necessary, only watching and listening.

Posting on social media might be a less casual act these days, as well, because we’ve seen the ramifications of blurring the border between physical and digital lives. Instagram ushered in the age of self-commodification online—it was the platform of the selfie—but TikTok and Twitch have turbocharged it. Selfies are no longer enough; video-based platforms showcase your body, your speech and mannerisms, and the room you’re in, perhaps even in real time. Everyone is forced to perform the role of an influencer. The barrier to entry is higher and the pressure to conform stronger. It’s no surprise, in this environment, that fewer people take the risk of posting and more settle into roles as passive consumers.

The patterns of life offscreen affect the makeup of the digital world, too. Having fun online was something that we used to do while idling in office jobs: stuck in front of computers all day, we had to find something on our screens to fill the down time. An earlier generation of blogs such as the Awl and Gawker seemed designed for aimless Internet surfing, delivering intermittent gossip, amusing videos, and personal essays curated by editors with quirky and individuated tastes. (When the Awl closed, in 2017, Jia Tolentino lamented the demise of “online freedom and fun.”) Now, in the aftermath of the pandemic, amid ongoing work-from-home policies, office workers are less tethered to their computers, and perhaps thus less inclined to chase likes on social media. They can walk away from their desks and take care of their children, walk their dog, or put their laundry in. This might have a salutary effect on individuals, but it means that fewer Internet-obsessed people are furiously creating posts for the rest of us to consume. The user growth rate of social platforms over all has slowed over the past several years; according to one estimate, it is down to 2.4 per cent in 2023.

That earlier generation of blogs once performed the task of aggregating news and stories from across the Internet. For a while, it seemed as though social-media feeds could fulfill that same function. Now it’s clear that the tech companies have little interest in directing users to material outside of their feeds. According to Axios, the top news and media sites have seen “organic referrals” from social media drop by more than half over the past three years. As of last week, X no longer displays the headlines for articles that users link to. The decline in referral traffic disrupts media business models, further degrading the quality of original content online. The proliferation of cheap, instant A.I.-generated content promises to make the problem worse.

Choire Sicha, the co-founder of the Awl and now an editor at New York, told me that he traces the seeds of social media’s degradation back a decade. “If I had a time machine I’d go back and assassinate 2014,” he said. That was the year of viral phenomena such as Gamergate, when a digital mob of disaffected video-game fans targeted journalists and game developers on social media; Ellen DeGeneres’s selfie with a gaggle of celebrities at the Oscars, which got retweeted millions of times; and the brief, wondrous fame of Alex, a random teen retail worker from Texas who won attention for his boy-next-door appearance. In those events, we can see some of the nascent forces that would solidify in subsequent years: the tyranny of the loudest voices; the entrenchment of traditional fame on new platforms; the looming emptiness of the content that gets most furiously shared and promoted. But at that point they still seemed like exceptions rather than the rule.

I have been trying to recall the times I’ve had fun online unencumbered by anonymous trolling, automated recommendations, or runaway monetization schemes. It was a long time ago, before social networks became the dominant highways of the Internet. What comes to mind is a Web site called Orisinal that hosted games made with Flash, the late interactive animation software that formed a significant part of the kitschy Internet of the two-thousands, before everyone began posting into the same platform content holes. The games on the site were cartoonish, cute, and pastel-colored, involving activities like controlling a rabbit jumping on stars into the sky or helping mice make a cup of tea. Orisinal was there for anyone to stumble upon, without the distraction of follower counts or sponsored content. You could e-mail the site to a friend, but otherwise there was nothing to share. That old version of the Internet is still there, but it’s been eclipsed by the modes of engagement that the social networks have incentivized. Through Reddit, I recently dug up an emulator of all the Orisinal games and quickly got absorbed into one involving assisting deer leaping across a woodland gap. My only reward was a personal high score. But it was more satisfying, and less lonely, than the experience these days on X. ♦

Underage Workers Are Training AI

Companies that provide Big Tech with AI data-labeling services are inadvertently hiring young teens to work on their platforms, often exposing them to traumatic content.

Like most kids his age, 15-year-old Hassan spent a lot of time online. Before the pandemic, he liked playing football with local kids in his hometown of Burewala in the Punjab region of Pakistan. But Covid lockdowns made him something of a recluse, attached to his mobile phone. “I just got out of my room when I had to eat something,” says Hassan, now 18, who asked to be identified under a pseudonym because he was afraid of legal action. But unlike most teenagers, he wasn’t scrolling TikTok or gaming. From his childhood bedroom, the high schooler was working in the global artificial intelligence supply chain, uploading and labeling data to train algorithms for some of the world’s largest AI companies.

The raw data used to train machine-learning algorithms is first labeled by humans, and human verification is also needed to evaluate their accuracy. This data-labeling ranges from the simple—identifying images of street lamps, say, or comparing similar ecommerce products—to the deeply complex, such as content moderation, where workers classify harmful content within data scraped from all corners of the internet. These tasks are often outsourced to gig workers, via online crowdsourcing platforms such as Toloka, which was where Hassan started his career.

A friend put him on to the site, which promised work anytime, from anywhere. He found that an hour’s labor would earn him around $1 to $2, he says, more than the national minimum wage, which was about $0.26 at the time. His mother is a homemaker, and his dad is a mechanical laborer. “You can say I belong to a poor family,” he says. When the pandemic hit, he needed work more than ever. Confined to his home, online and restless, he did some digging, and found that Toloka was just the tip of the iceberg.

“AI is presented as a magical box that can do everything,” says Saiph Savage, director of Northeastern University’s Civic AI Lab. “People just simply don’t know that there are human workers behind the scenes.”

At least some of those human workers are children. Platforms require that workers be over 18, but Hassan simply entered a relative’s details and used a corresponding payment method to bypass the checks—and he wasn’t alone in doing so. WIRED spoke to three other workers in Pakistan and Kenya who said they had also joined platforms as minors, and found evidence that the practice is widespread.

“When I was still in secondary school, so many teens discussed online jobs and how they joined using their parents' ID,” says one worker who joined Appen at 16 in Kenya, who asked to remain anonymous. After school, he and his friends would log on to complete annotation tasks late into the night, often for eight hours or more.

Appen declined to give an attributable comment.

“If we suspect a user has violated the User Agreement, Toloka will perform an identity check and request a photo ID and a photo of the user holding the ID,” Geo Dzhikaev, head of Toloka operations, says.

Driven by a global rush into AI, the global data labeling and collection industry is expected to grow to over $17.1 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research, a market research and consulting company. Crowdsourcing platforms such as Toloka, Appen, Clickworker, Teemwork.AI, and OneForma connect millions of remote gig workers in the global south to tech companies located in Silicon Valley. Platforms post micro-tasks from their tech clients, which have included Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, Google, Nvidia, Boeing, and Adobe. Many platforms also partner with Microsoft’s own data services platform, the Universal Human Relevance System (UHRS).

These workers are predominantly based in East Africa, Venezuela, Pakistan, India, and the Philippines—though there are even workers in refugee camps, who label, evaluate, and generate data. Workers are paid per task, with remuneration ranging from a cent to a few dollars—although the upper end is considered something of a rare gem, workers say. “The nature of the work often feels like digital servitude—but it's a necessity for earning a livelihood,” says Hassan, who also now works for Clickworker and Appen.

Sometimes, workers are asked to upload audio, images, and videos, which contribute to the data sets used to train AI. Workers typically don’t know exactly how their submissions will be processed, but these can be pretty personal: On Clickworker’s worker jobs tab, one task states: “Show us you baby/child! Help to teach AI by taking 5 photos of your baby/child!” for €2 ($2.15). The next says: “Let your minor (aged 13-17) take part in an interesting selfie project!”

Some tasks involve content moderation—helping AI distinguish between innocent content and that which contains violence, hate speech, or adult imagery. Hassan shared screen recordings of tasks available the day he spoke with WIRED. One UHRS task asked him to identify “fuck,” “c**t,” “dick,” and “bitch” from a body of text. For Toloka, he was shown pages upon pages of partially naked bodies, including sexualized images, lingerie ads, an exposed sculpture, and even a nude body from a Renaissance-style painting. The task? Decipher the adult from the benign, to help the algorithm distinguish between salacious and permissible torsos.

Hassan recalls moderating content while under 18 on UHRS that, he says, continues to weigh on his mental health. He says the content was explicit: accounts of rape incidents, lifted from articles quoting court records; hate speech from social media posts; descriptions of murders from articles; sexualized images of minors; naked images of adult women; adult videos of women and girls from YouTube and TikTok.

Many of the remote workers in Pakistan are underage, Hassan says. He conducted a survey of 96 respondents on a Telegram group chat with almost 10,000 UHRS workers, on behalf of WIRED. About a fifth said they were under 18.

Awais, 20, from Lahore, who spoke on condition that his first name not be published, began working for UHRS via Clickworker at 16, after he promised his girlfriend a birthday trip to the turquoise lakes and snow-capped mountains of Pakistan’s northern region. His parents couldn’t help him with the money, so he turned to data work, joining using a friend’s ID card. “It was easy,” he says.

He worked on the site daily, primarily completing Microsoft’s “Generic Scenario Testing Extension” task. This involved testing homepage and search engine accuracy. In other words, did selecting “car deals” on the MSN homepage bring up photos of cars? Did searching “cat” on Bing show feline images? He was earning $1 to $3 each day, but he found the work both monotonous and infuriating. At times he found himself working 10 hours for $1, because he had to do unpaid training to access certain tasks. Even when he passed the training, there might be no task to complete; or if he breached the time limit, they would suspend his account, he says. Then seemingly out of nowhere, he got banned from performing his most lucrative task—something workers say happens regularly. Bans can occur for a host of reasons, such as giving incorrect answers, answering too fast, or giving answers that deviate from the average pattern of other workers. He’d earned $70 in total. It was almost enough to take his high school sweetheart on the trip, so Awais logged off for good.

Clickworker did not respond to requests for comment. Microsoft declined to comment.

“In some instances, once a user finishes the training, the quota of responses has already been met for that project and the task is no longer available,” Dzhikaev said. “However, should other similar tasks become available, they will be able to participate without further training.”

Researchers say they’ve found evidence of underage workers in the AI industry elsewhere in the world. Julian Posada, assistant professor of American Studies at Yale University, who studies human labor and data production in the AI industry, says that he’s met workers in Venezuela who joined platforms as minors.

Bypassing age checks can be pretty simple. The most lenient platforms, like Clickworker and Toloka, simply ask workers to state they are over 18; the most secure, such as Remotasks, employ face recognition technology to match workers to their photo ID. But even that is fallible, says Posada, citing one worker who says he simply held the phone to his grandmother’s face to pass the checks. The sharing of a single account within family units is another way minors access the work, says Posada. He found that in some Venezuelan homes, when parents cook or run errands, children log on to complete tasks. He says that one family of six he met, with children as young as 13, all claimed to share one account. They ran their home like a factory, Posada says, so that two family members were at the computers working on data labeling at any given point. “Their backs would hurt because they have been sitting for so long. So they would take a break, and then the kids would fill in,” he says.

The physical distances between the workers training AI and the tech giants at the other end of the supply chain—“the deterritorialization of the internet,” Posada calls it—creates a situation where whole workforces are essentially invisible, governed by a different set of rules, or by none.

The lack of worker oversight can even prevent clients from knowing if workers are keeping their income. One Clickworker user in India, who requested anonymity to avoid being banned from the site, told WIRED he “employs” 17 UHRS workers in one office, providing them with a computer, mobile, and internet, in exchange for half their income. While his workers are aged between 18 and 20, due to Clickworker’s lack of age certification requirements, he knows of teenagers using the platform.

In the more shadowy corners of the crowdsourcing industry, the use of child workers is overt.

Captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) solving services, where crowdsourcing platforms pay humans to solve captchas, are a less understood part in the AI ecosystem. Captchas are designed to distinguish a bot from a human—the most notable example being Google’s reCaptcha, which asks users to identify objects in images to enter a website. The exact purpose of services that pay people to solve them remains a mystery to academics, says Posada. “But what I can confirm is that many companies, including Google's reCaptcha, use these services to train AI models,” he says. “Thus, these workers indirectly contribute to AI advancements.”

Google did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

There are at least 152 active services, mostly based in China, with more than half a million people working in the underground reCaptcha market, according to a 2019 study by researchers from Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.

“Stable job for everyone. Everywhere,” one service, Kolotibablo, states on its website. The company has a promotional website dedicated to showcasing its worker testimonials, which includes images of young children from across the world. In one, a smiling Indonesian boy shows his 11th birthday cake to the camera. “I am very happy to be able to increase my savings for the future,” writes another, no older than 7 or 8. A 14-year-old girl in a long Hello Kitty dress shares a photo of her workstation: a laptop on a pink, Barbie-themed desk.

Not every worker WIRED interviewed felt frustrated with the platforms. At 17, most of Younis Hamdeen’s friends were waiting tables. But the Pakistani teen opted to join UHRS via Appen instead, using the platform for three or four hours a day, alongside high school, earning up to $100 a month. Comparing products listed on Amazon was the most profitable task he encountered. “I love working for this platform,” Hamdeen, now 18, says, because he is paid in US dollars—which is rare in Pakistan—and so benefits from favorable exchange rates.

But the fact that the pay for this work is incredibly low compared to the wages of in-house employees of the tech companies, and that the benefits of the work flow one way—from the global south to the global north, leads to uncomfortable parallels. “We do have to consider the type of colonialism that is being promoted with this type of work,” says the Civic AI Lab’s Savage.

Hassan recently got accepted to a bachelor’s program in medical lab technology. The apps remain his sole income, working an 8 am to 6 pm shift, followed by 2 am to 6 am. However, his earnings have fallen to just $100 per month, as demand for tasks has outstripped supply, as more workers have joined since the pandemic.

He laments that UHRS tasks can pay as little as 1 cent. Even on higher-paid jobs, such as occasional social media tasks on Appen, the amount of time he needs to spend doing unpaid research means he needs to work five or six hours to complete an hour of real-time work, all to earn $2, he says.

“It’s digital slavery,” says Hassan.

Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly

A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?

Adam Mastroianni May 02, 2022

You may have noticed that every popular movie these days is a remake, reboot, sequel, spinoff, or cinematic universe expansion. In 2021, only one of the ten top-grossing films––the Ryan Reynolds vehicle Free Guy––was an original. There were only two originals in 2020’s top 10, and none at all in 2019.

People blame this trend on greedy movie studios or dumb moviegoers or competition from Netflix or humanity running out of ideas. Some say it’s a sign of the end of movies. Others claim there’s nothing new about this at all.

Some of these explanations are flat-out wrong; others may contain a nugget of truth. But all of them are incomplete, because this isn’t just happening in movies. In every corner of pop culture––movies, TV, music, books, and video games––a smaller and smaller cartel of superstars is claiming a larger and larger share of the market. What used to be winners-take-some has grown into winners-take-most and is now verging on winners-take-all. The (very silly) word for this oligopoly, like a monopoly but with a few players instead of just one.

I’m inherently skeptical of big claims about historical shifts. I recently published a paper showing that people overestimate how much public opinion has changed over the past 50 years, so naturally I’m on the lookout for similar biases here. But this shift is not an illusion. It’s big, it’s been going on for decades, and it’s happening everywhere you look. So let’s get to the bottom of it.

(Data and code available here.)

Movies

At the top of the box office charts, original films have gone extinct.

I looked at the 20 top-grossing movies going all the way back to 1977 (source), and I coded whether each was part of what film scholars call a “multiplicity”—sequels, prequels, franchises, spin-offs, cinematic universe expansions, etc. This required some judgment calls. Lots of movies are based on books and TV shows, but I only counted them as multiplicities if they were related to a previous movie. So 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles doesn’t get coded as a multiplicity, but 1991’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze does, and so does the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles remake. I also probably missed a few multiplicities, especially in earlier decades, since sometimes it’s not obvious that a movie has some connection to an earlier movie.

Regardless, the shift is gigantic. Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% ever year. In recent years, it’s been close to 100%.

Original movies just aren’t popular anymore, if they even get made in the first place.

Top movies have also recently started taking a larger chunk of the market. I extracted the revenue of the top 20 movies and divided it by the total revenue of the top 200 movies, going all the way back to 1986 (source). The top 20 movies captured about 40% of all revenue until 2015, when they started gobbling up even more.

Television

Thanks to cable and streaming, there's way more stuff on TV today than there was 50 years ago. So it would make sense if a few shows ruled the early decades of TV, and now new shows constantly displace each other at the top of the viewership charts.

Instead, the opposite has happened. I pulled the top 30 most-viewed TV shows from 1950 to 2019 (source) and found that fewer and fewer franchises rule a larger and larger share of the airwaves. In fact, since 2000, about a third of the top 30 most-viewed shows are either spinoffs of other shows in the top 30 (e.g., CSI and CSI: Miami) or multiple broadcasts of the same show (e.g., American Idol on Monday and American Idol on Wednesday).

Two caveats to this data. First, I’m probably slightly undercounting multiplicities from earlier decades, where the connections between shows might be harder for a modern viewer like me to understand––maybe one guy hosted multiple different shows, for example. And second, the Nielsen ratings I’m using only recently started accurately measuring viewership on streaming platforms. But even in 2019, only 14% of viewing time was spent on streaming, so this data isn’t missing much.

Music

It used to be that a few hitmakers ruled the charts––The Beatles, The Eagles, Michael Jackson––while today it’s a free-for-all, right?

Nope. A data scientist named Azhad Syed has done the analysis, and he finds that the number of artists on the Billboard Hot 100 has been decreasing for decades.

Chart by Azhad Syed

And since 2000, the number of hits per artist on the Hot 100 has been increasing.

Chart by Azhad Syed

(Azhad says he’s looking for a job––you should hire him!)

A smaller group of artists tops the charts, and they produce more of the chart-toppers. Music, too, has become an oligopoly.

Books

Literature feels like a different world than movies, TV, and music, and yet the trend is the same.

Using LiteraryHub's list of the top 10 bestselling books for every year from 1919 to 2017, I found that the oligopoly has come to book publishing as well. There are a couple ways we can look at this. First, we can look at the percentage of repeat authors in the top 10––that is, the number of books in the top 10 that were written by an author with another book in the top 10.

It used to be pretty rare for one author to have multiple books in the top 10 in the same year. Since 1990, it’s happened almost every year. No author ever had three top 10 books in one year until Danielle Steel did it 1998. In 2011, John Grisham, Kathryn Stockett, and Stieg Larsson all had two chart-topping books each.

We can also look at the percentage of authors in the top 10 were already famous––say, they had a top 10 book within the past 10 years. That has increased over time, too.

In the 1950s, a little over half of the authors in the top 10 had been there before. These days, it’s closer to 75%.

Video games

I tracked down the top 20 bestselling video games for each year from 1995 to 2021 (sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) and coded whether each belongs to a preexisting video game franchise. (Some games, like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, belong to franchises outside of video games. For these, I coded the first installment as originals and any subsequent installments as franchise games.)

The oligopoly rules video games too:

In the late 1990s, 75% or less of bestselling video games were franchise installments. Since 2005, it’s been above 75% every year, and sometimes it’s 100%. At the top of the charts, it’s all Mario, Zelda, Call of Duty, and Grand Theft Auto.

Why is this happening?

Any explanation for the rise of the pop oligopoly has to answer two questions: why have producers started producing more of the same thing, and why are consumers consuming it? I think the answers to the first question are invasion, consolidation, and innovation. I think the answer to the second question is proliferation.

Invasion

Software and the internet have made it easier than ever to create and publish content. Most of the stuff that random amateurs make is crap and nobody looks at it, but a tiny proportion gets really successful. This might make media giants choose to produce and promote stuff that independent weirdos never could, like an Avengers movie. This can’t explain why oligopolization started decades ago––YouTube only launched in 2005, for example, and most Americans didn’t have broadband until 2007––but it might explain why it’s accelerated and stuck around.

Consolidation

Big things like to eat, defeat, and outcompete smaller things. So over time, big things should get bigger and small things should die off. Indeed, movie studios, music labels, TV stations, and publishers of books and video games have all consolidated. Maybe it’s inevitable that major producers of culture will suck up or destroy everybody else, leaving nothing but superstars and blockbusters. Indeed, maybe cultural oligopoly is merely a transition state before we reach cultural monopoly.

Innovation

You may think there’s nothing left to discover in art forms as old as literature and music, and that they simply iterate as fashions change. But it took humans [thousands of years](http://www.essentialvermeer.com/technique/perspective/history.html#:~:text=In its mathematical form%2C linear,De pictura [On Painting]) to figure out how to create the illusion of depth in paintings. Novelists used to think that sentences had to be long and complicated until Hemingway came along, wrote some snappy prose, and changed everything. Even very old art forms, then, may have secrets left to discover. Maybe the biggest players in culture discovered some innovations that won them a permanent, first-mover chunk of market share. I can think of a few:

• In books: lightning-quick plots and chapter-ending cliffhangers. Nobody thinks The Da Vinci Code is high literature, but it’s a book that really really wants you to read it. And a lot of people did!
• In music: sampling. Musicians [seem to sample more often these days](https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2019/03/2019-the-state-of-sampling-draft.html#:~:text=1 in 5 Songs on,usually between 20-25%). Now we not only remake songs; we franchise them too.
• In movies, TV, and video games: cinematic universes. Studios have finally figured out that once audiences fall in love with fictional worlds, they want to spend lots of time in them. Marvel, DC, and Star Wars are the most famous, but there are also smaller universe expansions like Better Call Saul and El Camino from Breaking Bad and The Many Saints of Newark from The Sopranos. Video game developers have understood this for even longer, which is why Mario does everything from playing tennis to driving go-karts to, you know, being a piece of paper.

Proliferation

Invasion, consolidation, and innovation can, I think, explain the pop oligopoly from the supply side. But all three require a willing audience. So why might people be more open to experiencing the same thing over and over again?

As options multiply, choosing gets harder. You can’t possibly evaluate everything, so you start relying on cues like “this movie has Tom Hanks in it” or “I liked Red Dead Redemption, so I’ll probably like Red Dead Redemption II,” which makes you less and less likely to pick something unfamiliar.

Another way to think about it: more opportunities means higher opportunity costs, which could lead to lower risk tolerance. When the only way to watch a movie is to go pick one of the seven playing at your local AMC, you might take a chance on something new. But when you’ve got a million movies to pick from, picking a safe, familiar option seems more sensible than gambling on an original.

This could be happening across all of culture at once. Movies don’t just compete with other movies. They compete with every other way of spending your time, and those ways are both infinite and increasing. There are now [60,000](https://www.gutenberg.org/#:~:text=Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60%2C000 free eBooks) free books on Project Gutenberg, Spotify [says](https://newsroom.spotify.com/company-info/#:~:text=Discover%2C manage and share over,ad-free music listening experience) it has 78 million songs and 4 million podcast episodes, and humanity uploads 500 hours of video to YouTube [every minute](https://www.statista.com/statistics/259477/hours-of-video-uploaded-to-youtube-every-minute/#:~:text=As of February 2020%2C more,for online video has grown). So uh, yeah, the Tom Hanks movie sounds good.

What do we do about it?

Some may think that the rise of the pop oligopoly means the decline of quality. But the oligopoly can still make art: Red Dead Redemption II is a terrific game, “Blinding Lights” is a great song, and Toy Story 4 is a pretty good movie. And when you look back at popular stuff from a generation ago, there was plenty of dreck. We’ve forgotten the pulpy Westerns and insipid romances that made the bestseller lists while books like The Great Gatsby, Brave New World, and Animal Farm did not. American Idol is not so different from the televised talent shows of the 1950s. Popular culture has always been a mix of the brilliant and the banal, and nothing I’ve shown you suggests that the ratio has changed.

The problem isn’t that the mean has decreased. It’s that the variance has shrunk. Movies, TV, music, books, and video games should expand our consciousness, jumpstart our imaginations, and introduce us to new worlds and stories and feelings. They should alienate us sometimes, or make us mad, or make us think. But they can’t do any of that if they only feed us sequels and spinoffs. It’s like eating macaroni and cheese every single night forever: it may be comfortable, but eventually you’re going to get scurvy.

We haven’t fully reckoned with what the cultural oligopoly might be doing to us. How much does it stunt our imaginations to play the same video games we were playing 30 years ago? What message does it send that one of the most popular songs in the 2010s was about how a 1970s rock star was really cool? How much does it dull our ambitions to watch 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, where the most interesting scene is just Neo watching the original Matrix from 1999? How inspiring is it to watch tiny variations on the same police procedurals and reality shows year after year? My parents grew up with the first Star Wars movie, which had the audacity to create an entire universe. My niece and nephews are growing up with the ninth Star Wars movie, which aspires to move merchandise. Subsisting entirely on cultural comfort food cannot make us thoughtful, creative, or courageous.

Fortunately, there’s a cure for our cultural anemia. While the top of the charts has been oligopolized, the bottom remains a vibrant anarchy. There are weird books and funky movies and bangers from across the sea. Two of the most interesting video games of the past decade put you in the role of an immigration officer and an insurance claims adjuster. Every strange thing, wonderful and terrible, is available to you, but they’ll die out if you don’t nourish them with your attention. Finding them takes some foraging and digging, and then you’ll have to stomach some very odd, unfamiliar flavors. That’s good. Learning to like unfamiliar things is one of the noblest human pursuits; it builds our empathy for unfamiliar people. And it kindles that delicate, precious fire inside us––without it, we might as well be algorithms. Humankind does not live on bread alone, nor can our spirits long survive on a diet of reruns.

Réseaux sociaux : la fabrique de l’hostilité politique ?

Publié: 17 juin 2024, 15:21 CEST

Depuis quelques années, les réseaux sociaux comme Facebook et X (anciennement Twitter) sont devenus la cible d’accusations nombreuses : facteurs de diffusion de « fake news » à grande échelle, instruments de déstabilisation des démocraties par la Russie et la Chine, machines à capturer notre attention pour la vendre à des marchands de toutes sortes, théâtres d’un ciblage publicitaire toujours plus personnalisé et manipulateur, etc. En atteste le succès de documentaires et d’essais sur le coût humain, jugé considérable, des réseaux sociaux, comme The Social Dilemma sur Netflix.

L’un de ces discours, en particulier, rend les plates-formes digitales et leurs algorithmes responsables de l’amplification de l’hostilité en ligne et de la polarisation politique dans la société. Avec les discussions en ligne anonymes, affirment certains, n’importe qui serait susceptible de devenir un troll, c’est-à-dire une personne agressive, cynique et dépourvue de compassion, ou de se « radicaliser ».

Des travaux récents en sciences sociales quantitatives et en psychologie scientifique permettent toutefois d’apporter quelques correctifs à ce récit, excessivement pessimiste.

L’importance du contexte sociopolitique et de la psychologie

Pour commencer, plusieurs études suggèrent que si les individus font régulièrement l’expérience de discussions sur des sujets politiques qui deviennent conflictuelles, cette incivilité est en partie liée à des facteurs psychologiques et socio-économiques qui préexistent aux plates-formes digitales.

Dans une étude interculturelle de grande envergure, nous avons interrogé plus de 15 000 personnes via des panels représentatifs dans trente nations très diverses (France, Irak, Thaïlande, Pakistan, etc.) sur leurs expériences des conversations sur Internet. Notre première découverte est que ce sont dans les pays les plus inégalitaires économiquement et les moins démocratiques que les individus sont le plus souvent l’objet d’invectives hostiles de la part de leurs concitoyens sur les réseaux (comme en Turquie ou au Brésil). Ce phénomène découle manifestement des frustrations générées par ces sociétés plus répressives des aspirations individuelles.

Notre étude montre en outre que les individus qui s’adonnent le plus à l’hostilité en ligne sont aussi ceux qui sont les plus disposés à la recherche de statut social par la prise de risque. Ce trait de personnalité correspond à une orientation vers la dominance, c’est-à-dire à chercher à soumettre les autres à sa volonté (y compris par l’intimidation). Dans nos données interculturelles, nous observons que les individus ayant ce type de traits dominants sont nombreux dans les pays inégalitaires et non démocratiques. Des analyses indépendantes montrent d’ailleurs que la dominance est un élément clé de la psychologie de la conflictualité politique, puisqu’elle prédit également davantage de partage de ‘fake news’ moquant ou insultant les opposants politiques sur Internet, et plus d’attrait pour le conflit politique hors ligne, notamment.

Répliquant une étude antérieure, nous trouvons par ailleurs que ces individus motivés par la recherche de statut par la prise de risque, qui admettent le plus se comporter de manière hostile sur Internet, sont aussi ceux qui sont plus susceptibles d’interagir de manière agressive ou toxique dans des discussions en face à face (la corrélation entre l’hostilité en ligne et hors ligne est forte, de l’ordre de β = 0,77).

En résumé, l’hostilité politique en ligne semble largement être le fruit de personnalités particulières, rendues agressives par les frustrations engendrées par des contextes sociaux inégalitaires, et activant notre tendance à voir le monde en termes de “nous” vs « eux ». Au plan politique, réduire les disparités de richesses entre groupes et rendre nos institutions plus démocratiques constituent des objectifs probablement incontournables si nous souhaitons faire advenir un Internet (et une société civile) plus harmonieux.

Les réseaux : prismes exagérant l’hostilité ambiante

Si notre étude replace l’hostilité politique en ligne dans un plus large contexte, elle ne nie pas tout rôle aux plates-formes dans la production de la polarisation politique pour autant.

Les réseaux sociaux permettent à un contenu d’être diffusé à l’identique à des millions de personnes (à l’inverse de la communication verbale, lieu de distorsions inévitables). À ce titre, ils peuvent mésinformer ou mettre en colère des millions de personnes à un très faible coût. Ceci est vrai que l’information fausse ou toxique soit créée intentionnellement pour générer des clics, ou qu’elle soit le fruit involontaire des biais politiques d’un groupe politique donné.

[Déjà plus de 120 000 abonnements aux newsletters The Conversation. Et vous ? Abonnez-vous aujourd’hui pour mieux comprendre les grands enjeux du monde.]

Si les échanges sur les réseaux sociaux manquent souvent de civilité, c’est également à cause de la possibilité qu’ils offrent d’échanger avec des étrangers anonymes, dépersonnalisés. Cette expérience unique à l’ère Internet réduit le sentiment de responsabilité personnelle, ainsi que l’empathie vis-à-vis d’interlocuteurs que nous ne voyons plus comme des personnes mais comme les membres interchangeables de « tribus » politiques.

Des analyses récentes rappellent par ailleurs que les réseaux sociaux – comme le journalisme, à bien des égards – opèrent moins comme le miroir que comme le prisme déformant de la diversité des opinions dans la société.

Les posts politiques indignés et potentiellement insultants sont souvent le fait de personnes plus déterminées à s’exprimer et radicales que la moyenne – que ce soit pour signaler leurs engagements, exprimer une colère, faire du prosélytisme, etc. Même lorsqu’ils représentent une assez faible proportion de la production écrite sur les réseaux, ces posts se trouvent promus par des algorithmes programmés pour mettre en avant les contenus capables d’attirer l’attention et de déclencher des réponses, dont les messages clivants font partie.

À contrario, la majorité des utilisateurs, plus modérée et moins péremptoire, est réticente à se lancer dans des discussions politiques qui récompensent rarement la bonne foi argumentative et qui dégénèrent souvent en « shitstorms » (c.-à-d., en déchaînements de haine).

Ces biais de sélection et de perception produisent l’impression trompeuse que les convictions radicales et hostiles sont à la fois plus répandues et tolérées moralement qu’elles ne le sont en réalité.

Quand l’exposition à la différence énerve

Ceci étant dit, l’usage des réseaux sociaux semble pouvoir contribuer à augmenter l’hostilité et la radicalité politiques selon un mécanisme au moins : celui de l’exposition à des versions caricaturales et agressives des positions politiques adverses, qui agacent.

Contrairement à une croyance répandue, la plupart de nos connexions virtuelles ne prennent typiquement pas vraiment la forme de « chambres d’écho », nous isolant dans des sas d’idées politiques totalement homogènes.

Bien que certains réseaux soient effectivement construits de cette manière (4Chan ou certains sub-Reddits), les plus larges plates-formes que sont Facebook (3 milliards d’utilisateurs) et X (550 millions) nous font typiquement défiler une certaine diversité d’opinions devant les yeux. Celle-ci est en tous cas fréquemment supérieure à celle de nos relations amicales : êtes-vous encore régulièrement en contact avec des copains de collège qui ont « viré Front national » ? Probablement pas, mais il est plus probable que vous lisiez leurs posts Facebook.

Cette exposition à l’altérité idéologique est désirable, en théorie, puisqu’elle devrait permettre de nous faire découvrir les angles morts de nos connaissances et convictions politiques, notre commune humanité, et donc nous rendre à la fois plus humbles et plus respectueux les uns des autres. Malheureusement, le mode sur lequel la plupart des gens expriment leurs convictions politiques – sur les réseaux comme à la machine à café – est assez dépourvu de nuance et de pédagogie. Il tend à réduire les positions adverses à des caricatures diabolisées, et cherche moins à persuader le camp d’en face qu’à galvaniser les personnes qui sont déjà d’accord avec soi, ou à se faire bien voir d’amis politiques.

Prenant appui sur des études expérimentales déployées sur Twitter et des interviews de militants démocrates et républicains menées avec son équipe, le sociologue Chris Bail nous avertit dans son livre Le prisme des réseaux sociaux. D’après lui, une exposition répétée à des contenus peu convaincants et moqueurs produits par nos ennemis politiques peut paradoxalement renforcer les partisans dans leurs positions et identités préexistantes, plutôt que de les rapprocher intellectuellement et émotionnellement les uns des autres.

Cependant, cette relation entre usage des réseaux sociaux et polarisation politique pourrait dépendre beaucoup du temps d’exposition et n’apparaît pas dans tous les échantillons étudiés. Ainsi, des études explorant les effets d’un arrêt de l’utilisation de Facebook et d’Instagram n’observent pas que l’utilisation de ces médias sociaux polarise de façon détectable les opinions politiques des utilisateurs.

Rappelons-nous toujours que les discours pointant des menaces pesant sur la société jouissent d’un avantage concurrentiel considérable sur le marché des idées et des conversations, en raison de leur attractivité pour nos esprits. Il convient donc d’approcher la question des liens entre réseaux sociaux, hostilité et polarisation politique avec nuance, en évitant les travers symétriques de l’optimisme béat et de la panique collective.

DensePose From WiFi

Jiaqi Geng, Dong Huang, Fernando De la Torre 31 Dec 2022

Abstract

Advances in computer vision and machine learning techniques have
led to significant development in 2D and 3D human pose estimation
from RGB cameras, LiDAR, and radars. However, human pose esti-
mation from images is adversely affected by occlusion and lighting,
which are common in many scenarios of interest. Radar and LiDAR
technologies, on the other hand, need specialized hardware that is
expensive and power-intensive. Furthermore, placing these sensors
in non-public areas raises significant privacy concerns.

To address these limitations, recent research has explored the use
of WiFi antennas (1D sensors) for body segmentation and key-point
body detection. This paper further expands on the use of the WiFi
signal in combination with deep learning architectures, commonly
used in computer vision, to estimate dense human pose correspon-
dence. We developed a deep neural network that maps the phase
and amplitude of WiFi signals to UV coordinates within 24 human
regions. The results of the study reveal that our model can estimate
the dense pose of multiple subjects, with comparable performance
to image-based approaches, by utilizing WiFi signals as the only
input. This paves the way for low-cost, broadly accessible, and
privacy-preserving algorithms for human sensing.

Densepose

Official website of densepose

Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI

Corruption everywhere, even in YouTube's kids content

Erik Hoel Feb 27, 2024

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

The amount of AI-generated content is beginning to overwhelm the internet. Or maybe a better term is pollute. Pollute its searches, its pages, its feeds, everywhere you look. I’ve been predicting that generative AI would have pernicious effects on our culture since 2019, but now everyone can feel it. Back then I called it the coming “semantic apocalypse.” Well, the semantic apocalypse is here, and you’re being affected by it, even if you don’t know it. A minor personal example: last year I published a nonfiction book, The World Behind the World, and now on Amazon I find this.

What, exactly, are these “workbooks” for my book? AI pollution. Synthetic trash heaps floating in the online ocean. The authors aren’t real people, some asshole just fed the manuscript into an AI and didn’t check when it spit out nonsensical summaries. But it doesn’t matter, does it? A poor sod will click on the $9.99 purchase one day, and that’s all that’s needed for this scam to be profitable since the process is now entirely automatable and costs only a few cents. Pretty much all published authors are affected by similar scams, or will be soon.

Now that generative AI has dropped the cost of producing bullshit to near zero, we see clearly the future of the internet: a garbage dump. Google search? They often lead with fake AI-generated images amid the real things. Post on Twitter? Get replies from bots selling porn. But that’s just the obvious stuff. Look closely at the replies to any trending tweet and you’ll find dozens of AI-written summaries in response, cheery Wikipedia-style repeats of the original post, all just to farm engagement. AI models on Instagram accumulate hundreds of thousands of subscribers and people openly shill their services for creating them. AI musicians fill up YouTube and Spotify. Scientific papers are being AI-generated. AI images mix into historical research. This isn’t mentioning the personal impact too: from now on, every single woman who is a public figure will have to deal with the fact that deepfake porn of her is likely to be made. That’s insane.

And rather than this being pure skullduggery, people and institutions are willing to embrace low-quality AI-generated content, trying to shift the Overton window to make things like this acceptable:

source

That’s not hardball capitalism. That’s polluting our culture for your own minor profit. It’s not morally legitimate for the exact same reasons that polluting a river for a competitive edge is not legitimate. Yet name-brand media outlets are embracing generative AI just like SEO-spammers are, for the same reasons.

E.g., investigative work at Futurism caught Sports Illustrated red-handed using AI-generated articles written by fake writers. Meet Drew Ortiz.

He doesn’t exist. That face is an AI-generated portrait, which was previously listed for sale on a website. As Futurism describes:

Ortiz isn't the only AI-generated author published by Sports Illustrated, according to a person involved with the creation of the content…

"At the bottom [of the page] there would be a photo of a person and some fake description of them like, 'oh, John lives in Houston, Texas. He loves yard games and hanging out with his dog, Sam.' Stuff like that," they continued. "It's just crazy."

This isn’t what everyone feared, which is AI replacing humans by being better—it’s replacing them because AI is so much cheaper. Sports Illustrated was not producing human-quality level content with these methods, but it was still profitable.

The AI authors' writing often sounds like it was written by an alien; one Ortiz article, for instance, warns that volleyball "can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with."

Sports Illustrated, in a classy move, deleted all the evidence. Drew was replace by Sora Tanaka, bearing a face also listed for sale on the same website with the description of a “joyful asian young-adult female with long brown hair and brown eyes.”

Given that even prestigious outlets like The Guardian refuse to put any clear limits on their use of AI, if you notice odd turns of phrase or low-quality articles, the likelihood that they’re written by an AI, or with AI-assistance, is now high.

Sadly, the people affected the most by generative AI are the ones who can’t defend themselves. Because they don’t even know what AI is. Yet we’ve abandoned them to swim in polluted information currents. I’m talking, unfortunately, about toddlers. Because let me introduce you to…

the hell that is AI-generated children’s YouTube content.

YouTube for kids is quickly becoming a stream of synthetic content. Much of it now consists of wooden digital characters interacting in short nonsensical clips without continuity or purpose. Toddlers are forced to sit and watch this runoff because no one is paying attention. And the toddlers themselves can’t discern that characters come and go and that the plots don’t make sense and that it’s all just incoherent dream-slop. The titles don’t match the actual content, and titles that are all the parents likely check, because they grew up in a culture where if a YouTube video said BABY LEARNING VIDEOS and had a million views it was likely okay. Now, some of the nonsense AI-generated videos aimed at toddlers have tens of millions of views.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes video on a single channel that made 1.2 million dollars via AI-generated “educational content” aimed at toddlers.

As the video says:

These kids, when they watch these kind of videos, they watch them over and over and over again.

They aren’t confessing. They’re bragging. And the particular channel they focus on isn’t even the worst offender—at least that channel’s content mostly matches the subheadings and titles, even if the videos are jerky, strange, off-putting, repetitious, clearly inhuman. Other channels, which are also obviously AI-generated, get worse and worse. Here’s a “kid’s education” channel that is AI-generated (took about one minute to find) with 11.7 million subscribers.

They don’t use proper English, and after quickly going through some shapes like the initial video title promises (albeit doing it in a way that makes you feel like you’re going insane) the rest of the video devolves into randomly-generated rote tasks, eerie interactions, more incorrect grammar, and uncanny musical interludes of songs that serve no purpose but to pad the time. It is the creation of an alien mind.

Here’s an example of the next frontier: completely start-to-finish AI-generated music videos for toddlers. Below is a how-to video for these new techniques. The result? Nightmarish parrots with twisted double-beaks and four mutated eyes singing artificial howls from beyond. Click and behold (or don’t, if you want to sleep tonight).

All around the nation there are toddlers plunked down in front of iPads being subjected to synthetic runoff, deprived of human contact even in the media they consume. There’s no other word but dystopian. Might not actual human-generated cultural content normally contain cognitive micro-nutrients (like cohesive plots and sentences, detailed complexity, reasons for transitions, an overall gestalt, etc) that the human mind actually needs? We’re conducting this experiment live. For the first time in history developing brains are being fed choppy low-grade and cheaply-produced synthetic data created en masse by generative AI, instead of being fed with real human culture. No one knows the effects, and no one appears to care. Especially not the companies, because…

OpenAI has happily allowed pollution.

Why blame them, specifically? Well, first of all, their massive impact—e.g., most of the kids videos are built from scripts generated by ChatGPT. And more generally, what AI capabilities are considered okay to deploy has long been a standard set by OpenAI. Despite their supposed safety focus, OpenAI failed to foresee that its creations would thoroughly pollute the internet across all platforms and services. You can see this failure in how they assessed potential negative outcomes in the announcement of GPT-2 on their blog, back in 2019. While they did warn that these models could have serious longterm consequences for the information ecosystem, the specifics they were concerned with were things like:

Generate misleading news articles

Impersonate others online

Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media

Automate the production of spam/phishing content

This may sound kind of in line with what’s happened, but if you read further, it becomes clear that what they meant by “faked content” was mainly malicious actors promoting misinformation, or the same shadowy malicious actors using AI to phish for passwords, etc.

These turned out to be only minor concerns compared to AI’s cultural pollution. OpenAI kept talking about “actors” when they should have been talking about “users.” Because it turns out, all AI-generated content is fake! Or it’s all kind of fake. AI-written websites, now sprouting up like an unstoppable invasive species, don’t necessarily have an intent to mislead; it’s just that AI content is low-effort banalities generated for pennies, so you can SEO spam and do all sorts of manipulative games around search to attract eyeballs and ad revenue.

That is, the OpenAI team didn’t stop to think that regular users just generating mounds of AI-generated content on the internet would have very similar negative effects to as if there were a lot of malicious use by intentional bad actors. Because there’s no clear distinction! The fact that OpenAI was both honestly worried about negative effects, and at the same time didn’t predict the enshittification of the internet they spearheaded, should make us extremely worried they will continue to miss the negative downstream effects of their increasingly intelligent models. They failed to foresee the floating mounds of clickbait garbage, the synthetic info-trash cities, all to collect clicks and eyeballs—even from innocent children who don’t know any better. And they won’t do anything to stop it, because…

AI pollution is a tragedy of the commons.

This term, "tragedy of the commons,” originated in the rising environmentalism of the 20th century, and would lead to many of the regulations that keep our cities free of smog and our rivers clean. Garrett Hardin, an ecologist and biologist, coined it in an article in [Science](https://math.uchicago.edu/~shmuel/Modeling/Hardin, Tragedy of the Commons.pdf) in 1968. The article is still instructively relevant. Hardin wrote:

An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution…

He goes on to discuss several problems for which there are no technical solutions, since rational actors will drive the system toward destruction via competition:

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

One central example of Hardin’s became instrumental to the environmental movement.

… the tragedy of the commons reappears in problems of pollution. Here it is not a question of taking something out of the commons, but of putting something in—sewage, or chemical, radioactive, and heat wastes into water; noxious and dangerous fumes into the air; and distracting and unpleasant advertising signs into the line of sight. The calculations of utility are much the same as before. The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. Since this is true for everyone, we are locked into a system of "fouling our own nest," so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.

We are currently fouling our own nests. Since the internet economy runs on eyeballs and clicks the new ability of anyone, anywhere, to easily generate infinite low-quality content via AI is now remorselessly generating tragedy.

The solution, as Hardin noted, isn’t technical. You can’t detect AI outputs reliably anyway (another initial promise that OpenAI abandoned). The companies won’t self regulate, given their massive financial incentives. We need the equivalent of a Clean Air Act: a Clean Internet Act. We can’t just sit by and let human culture end up buried.

Luckily we’re on the cusp of all that incredibly futuristic technology promised by AI. Any day now, our GDP will start to rocket forward. In fact, soon we’ll cure all disease, even aging itself, and have robot butlers and Universal Basic Income and high-definition personalized entertainment. Who cares if toddlers had to watch inhuman runoff for a few billion years of viewing-time to make the future happen? It was all worth it. Right? Let’s wait a little bit longer. If we wait just a little longer utopia will surely come.

We Need To Rewild The Internet

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

By Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon April 16, 2024

“The word for world is forest” — Ursula K. Le Guin

In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.

So-called “scientific forestry” was that century’s growth hacking. It made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. They were replaced with lower-skilled laborers following basic algorithmic instructions to keep the monocrop tidy, the understory bare.

Information and decision-making power now flowed straight to the top. Decades later when the first crop was felled, vast fortunes were made, tree by standardized tree. The clear-felled forests were replanted, with hopes of extending the boom. Readers of the American political anthropologist of anarchy and order, James C. Scott, know [what happened](https://files.libcom.org/files/Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott.pdf) next.

It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare, they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered.

The story of German scientific forestry transmits a timeless truth: When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.

We all know this. We see it each time we reach for our phones. But what most people have missed is how this concentration reaches deep into the internet’s infrastructure — the pipes and protocols, cables and networks, search engines and browsers. These structures determine how we build and use the internet, now and in the future.

They’ve concentrated into a series of near-planetary duopolies. For example, as of April 2024, Google and Apple’s internet browsers have captured almost 85% of the world market share, Microsoft and Apple’s two desktop operating systems over 80%. Google runs 84% of global search and Microsoft 3%. Slightly more than half of all phones come from Apple and Samsung, while over 99% of mobile operating systems run on Google or Apple software. Two cloud computing providers, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure [make up](https://www.hava.io/blog/2024-cloud-market-share-analysis-decoding-industry-leaders-and-trends#:~:text=Amazon Web Services (AWS) maintains,in the Asia-Pacific market.) over 50% of the global market. Apple and Google’s email clients manage nearly 90% of global email. Google and Cloudflare serve around 50% of global domain name system requests.

Two kinds of everything may be enough to fill a fictional ark and repopulate a ruined world, but can’t run an open, global “network of networks” where everyone has the same chance to innovate and compete. No wonder internet engineer Leslie Daigle termed the concentration and consolidation of the internet’s technical architecture “‘climate change’ of the Internet ecosystem.”

Walled Gardens Have Deep Roots

The internet made the tech giants possible. Their services have scaled globally, via its open, interoperable core. But for the past decade, they’ve also worked to enclose the varied, competing and often open-source or collectively provided services the internet is built on into their proprietary domains. Although this improves their operational efficiency, it also ensures that the flourishing conditions of their own emergence aren’t repeated by potential competitors. For tech giants, the long period of open internet evolution is over. Their internet is not an ecosystem. It’s a zoo.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta are consolidating their control deep into the underlying infrastructure through acquisitions, vertical integration, building proprietary networks, creating chokepoints and concentrating functions from different technical layers into a single silo of top-down control. They can afford to, using the vast wealth reaped in their one-off harvest of collective, global wealth.

​ “That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the ‘pathology of command and control.’”

Taken together, the enclosure of infrastructure and imposition of technology monoculture forecloses our futures. Internet people like to talk about “the stack,” or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It’s a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design: Key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience, generality and create room for innovation.

Initially funded by the U.S. military and designed by academic researchers to function in wartime, the internet evolved to work anywhere, in any condition, operated by anyone who wanted to connect. But what was a dynamic, ever-evolving game of Tetris with distinct “players” and “layers” is today hardening into a continent-spanning system of compacted tectonic plates. Infrastructure is not just what we see on the surface; it’s the forces below, that make mountains and power tsunamis. Whoever controls infrastructure determines the future. If you doubt that, consider that in Europe we’re still using roads and living in towns and cities the Roman Empire mapped out 2,000 years ago.

In 2019, some internet engineers in the global standards-setting body, the Internet Engineering Task Force, raised the alarm. Daigle, a respected engineer who had previously chaired its oversight committee and internet architecture board, wrote in a policy brief that consolidation meant network structures were ossifying throughout the stack, making incumbents harder to dislodge and violating a core principle of the internet: that it does not create “permanent favorites.” Consolidation doesn’t just squeeze out competition. It narrows the kinds of relationships possible between operators of different services.

As Daigle put it: “The more proprietary solutions are built and deployed instead of collaborative open standards-based ones, the less the internet survives as a platform for future innovation.” Consolidation kills collaboration between service providers through the stack by rearranging an array of different relationships — competitive, collaborative — into a single predatory one.

Since then, standards development organizations started several initiatives to name and tackle infrastructure consolidation, but these floundered. Bogged down in technical minutiae, unable to separate themselves from their employers’ interests and deeply held professional values of simplification and control, most internet engineers simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?

Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats, we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists also know how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.

What Is Rewilding?

Rewilding “aims to restore healthy ecosystems by creating wild, biodiverse spaces,” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. More ambitious and risk-tolerant than traditional conservation, it targets entire ecosystems to make space for complex food webs and the emergence of unexpected interspecies relations. It’s less interested in saving specific endangered species. Individual species are just ecosystem components, and focusing on components loses sight of the whole. Ecosystems flourish through multiple points of contact between their many elements, just like computer networks. And like in computer networks, ecosystem interactions are multifaceted and generative.

Rewilding has much to offer people who care about the internet. As Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe wrote in their book “Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery,” rewilding pays attention “to the emergent properties of interactions between ‘things’ in ecosystems … a move from linear to systems thinking.”

It’s a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [that] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: Hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command and control.

​ “The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.”

Rewilding the internet is more than a metaphor. It’s a framework and plan. It gives us fresh eyes for the wicked problem of extraction and control, and new means and allies to fix it. It recognizes that ending internet monopolies isn’t just an intellectual problem. It’s an emotional one. It answers questions like: How do we keep going when the monopolies have more money and power? How do we act collectively when they suborn our community spaces, funding and networks? And how do we communicate to our allies what fixing it will look and feel like?

Rewilding is a positive vision for the networks we want to live inside, and a shared story for how we get there. It grafts a new tree onto technology’s tired old stock.

What Ecology Knows

Ecology knows plenty about complex systems that technologists can benefit from. First, it knows that shifting baselines are real.

If you were born around the 1970s, you probably remember many more dead insects on the windscreen of your parents’ car than on your own. Global land-dwelling insect populations are dropping about 9% a decade. If you’re a geek, you probably programmed your own computer to make basic games. You certainly remember a web with more to read than the same five websites. You may have even written your own blog.

But many people born after 2000 probably think a world with few insects, little ambient noise from birdcalls, where you regularly use only a few social media and messaging apps (rather than a whole web) is normal. As Jepson and Blythe wrote, shifting baselines are “where each generation assumes the nature they experienced in their youth to be normal and unwittingly accepts the declines and damage of the generations before.” Damage is already baked in. It even seems natural.

Ecology knows that shifting baselines dampen collective urgency and deepen generational divides. People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet. If the internet for you is the massive sky-scraping silo you happen to live inside and the only thing you can see outside is the single, other massive sky-scraping silo, then how can you imagine anything else?

Concentrated digital power produces the same symptoms that command and control produces in biological ecosystems; acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached. What scale is needed for rewilding to succeed? It’s one thing to reintroduce wolves to the 3,472 square miles of Yellowstone, and quite another to cordon off about 20 square miles of a polder (land reclaimed from a body of water) known as Oostvaardersplassen near Amsterdam. Large and diverse Yellowstone is likely complex enough to adapt to change, but Oostvaardersplassen has struggled.

​ “Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments … that madden the creatures trapped within.”

In the 1980s, the Dutch government attempted to regenerate a section of the overgrown Oostvaardersplassen. An independent-minded government ecologist, Frans Vera, said reeds and scrub would dominate unless now-extinct herbivores grazed them. In place of ancient aurochs, the state forest management agency introduced the famously bad-tempered German Heck cattle and in place of an extinct steppe pony, a Polish semi-feral breed.

Some 30 years on, with no natural predators, and after plans for a wildlife corridor to another reserve came to nothing, there were many more animals than the limited winter vegetation could sustain. People were horrified by starving cows and ponies, and beginning in 2018, government agencies instituted animal welfare checks and culling.

Just turning the clock back was insufficient. The segment of Oostvaardersplassen was too small and too disconnected to be rewilded. Because the animals had nowhere else to go, overgrazing and collapse was inevitable, an embarrassing but necessary lesson. Rewilding is a work in progress. It’s not about trying to revert ecosystems to a mythical Eden. Instead, rewilders seek to rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes and letting them operate at scale to generate complexity. But rewilding, itself a human intervention, can take several turns to get right.

Whatever we do, the internet isn’t returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or organizations operating their own mail servers again instead of off-the-shelf solutions like G-Suite. But some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs, as we discover (yet again) that relying on one app to host global conversations creates a single point of failure and control. New systems are growing, like the Fediverse with its federated islands, or Bluesky with algorithmic choice and composable moderation.

We don’t know what the future holds. Our job is to keep open as much opportunity as we can, trusting that those who come later will use it. Instead of setting purity tests for which kind of internet is most like the original, we can test changes against the values of the original design. Do new standards protect the network’s “generality,” i.e. its ability to support multiple uses, or is functionality limited to optimize efficiency for the biggest tech firms?

As early as 1985, plant ecologists Steward T.A. Pickett and Peter S. White wrote in “The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and Patch Dynamics,” that an “essential paradox of wilderness conservation is that we seek to preserve what must change.” Some internet engineers know this. David Clark, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who worked on some of the internet’s earliest protocols, wrote an entire book about other network architectures that might have been built if different values, like security or centralized management, had been prioritized by the internet’s creators.

But our internet took off because it was designed as a general-purpose network, built to connect anyone.

Our internet was built to be complex and unbiddable, to do things we cannot yet imagine. When we interviewed Clark, he told us that “‘complex’ implies a system in which you have emergent behavior, a system in which you can’t model the outcomes. Your intuitions may be wrong. But a system that’s too simple means lost opportunities.” Everything we collectively make that’s worthwhile is complex and thereby a little messier. The cracks are where new people and ideas get in.

Internet infrastructure is a degraded ecosystem, but it’s also a built environment, like a city. Its unpredictability makes it generative, worthwhile and deeply human. In 1961, Jane Jacobs, an American-Canadian activist and author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” argued that mixed-use neighborhoods were safer, happier, more prosperous, and more livable than the sterile, highly controlling designs of urban planners like New York’s Robert Moses.

​ “As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.”

Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers Moses crammed people into when he demolished mixed-use neighborhoods and built highways through them, today’s top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours.

As Jacobs wrote: “As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge.” As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.

Ecosystems endure because species serve as checks and balances on each other. They have different modes of interaction, not just extraction, but mutualism, commensalism, competition and predation. In flourishing ecosystems, predators are subject to limits. They’re just one part of a complex web that passes calories around, not a one-way ticket to the end of evolution.

Ecologists know that diversity is resilience.

On July 18, 2001, 11 carriages of a 60-car freight train derailed in the Howard Street Tunnel under Mid-Town Belvedere, a neighborhood just north of downtown Baltimore. Within minutes, one carriage containing a highly flammable chemical was punctured. The escaping chemical ignited, and soon, adjacent carriages were alight in a fire that took about five days to put out. The disaster multiplied and spread. Thick, brick tunnel walls acted like an oven, and temperatures rose to nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A more than three-foot-wide water main above the tunnels burst, flooding the tunnel with millions of gallons within hours. It only cooled a little. Three weeks later, an explosion linked to the combustible chemical blew out manhole covers located as far as two miles away.

WorldCom, then the second largest long-distance phone company in the U.S., had fiber-optic cables in the tunnel carrying high volumes of phone and internet traffic. However, according to Clark, the MIT professor, WorldCom’s resilience planning meant traffic was spread over different fiber networks in anticipation of just this kind of event.

On paper, WorldCom had network redundancy. But almost immediately, U.S. internet traffic slowed, and WorldCom’s East Coast and transatlantic phone lines went down. The region’s narrow physical topography had concentrated all those different fiber networks into a single chokepoint, the Howard Street Tunnel. WorldCom’s resilience was, quite literally, incinerated. It had technological redundancy, but not diversity. Sometimes we don’t notice concentration until it’s too late.

Clark tells the story of the Howard Street Tunnel fire to show that bottlenecks aren’t always obvious, especially at the operational level, and huge systems that seem secure, due to their size and resources, can unexpectedly crumble.

In today’s internet, much traffic passes through tech firms’ private networks, for example, Google and Meta’s own undersea cables. Much internet traffic is served from a few dominant content distribution networks, like Cloudflare and Akamai, who run their own networks of proxy servers and data centers. Similarly, that traffic goes through an increasingly small number of domain name system (DNS) resolvers, which work like phone books for the internet, linking website names to their numeric address.

All of this improves network speed and efficiency but creates new and non-obvious bottlenecks like the Howard Street Tunnel. Centralized service providers say they’re better resourced and skilled at attacks and failures, but they are also large, attractive targets for attackers and possible single points of system failure.

On Oct. 21, 2016, dozens of major U.S. websites suddenly stopped working. Domain names belonging to Airbnb, Amazon, PayPal, CNN and The New York Times simply didn’t resolve. All were clients of the commercial DNS service provider, Dyn, which had been hit by a cyberattack. Hackers infected [tens of thousands](https://coverlink.com/case-study/mirai-ddos-attack-on-dyn/#:~:text=Impacted internet platforms included PayPal,platforms in approximately two hours) of internet-enabled devices with malicious software, creating a network of hijacked devices, or a botnet, that they used to bombard Dyn with queries until it collapsed. America’s biggest internet brands were brought down by nothing more than a network of baby monitors, security webcams and other consumer devices. Although they all likely had resilience planning and redundancies, they went down because a single chokepoint — in one crucial layer of infrastructure — failed.

​ “Crashes, fires and floods may simply be entropy in action, but systemically concentrated and risky infrastructures are choices made manifest — and we can make better ones.”

Widespread outages due to centralized chokepoints have become so common that investors even use them to identify opportunities. When a failure by cloud provider Fastly took high-profile websites offline in 2021, its share price surged. Investors were delighted by headlines that informed them of an obscure technical service provider with an apparent lock on an essential service. To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn’t look like fragility but like a chance to profit.

The result of infrastructural narrowness is baked-in fragility that we only notice after a breakdown. But monoculture is also highly visible in our search and browser tools. Search, browsing and social media are how we find and share knowledge and how we communicate. They’re a critical, global epistemic and democratic infrastructure, controlled by just a few U.S. companies. Crashes, fires and floods may simply be entropy in action, but systemically concentrated and risky infrastructures are choices made manifest — and we can make better ones.

The Look & Feel Of A Rewilded Internet

A rewilded internet will have many more service choices. Some services like search and social media will be broken up, as AT&T eventually was. Instead of tech firms extracting and selling people’s personal data, different payment models will fund the infrastructure we need. Right now, there is little explicit provision for public goods like internet protocols and browsers, essential to making the internet work. The biggest tech firms subsidize and profoundly influence them.

Part of rewilding means taking what’s been pulled into the big tech stack back out of it, and paying for the true costs of connectivity. Some things like basic connectivity we will continue to pay for directly, and others, like browsers, we will support indirectly but transparently, as described below. The rewilded internet will have an abundance of ways to connect and relate to each other. There won’t be just one or two numbers to call if leaders of a political coup decide to shut the internet down in the middle of the night, as has happened in places like Egypt and Myanmar. No one entity will permanently be on top. A rewilded internet will be a more interesting, usable, stable and enjoyable place to be.

Through extensive research, Nobel-winning economist Elinor Ostrom found that “when individuals are well informed about the problem they face and about who else is involved, and can build settings where trust and reciprocity can emerge, grow, and be sustained over time, costly and positive actions are frequently taken without waiting for an external authority to impose rules, monitor compliance, and assess penalties.” Ostrom found people spontaneously organizing to manage natural resources — from water company cooperation in California to Maine lobster fishermen organizing to prevent overfishing.

Self-organization also exists as part of a key internet function: traffic coordination. Internet exchange points (IXPs) are an example of common-pool resource management, where internet service providers (ISPs) collectively agree to carry each other’s data for low or no cost. Network operators of all kinds — telecoms companies, large tech firms, universities, governments and broadcasters — all need to send large amounts of data through other ISPs’ networks so that it gets to its destination.

If they managed this separately through individual contracts, they’d spend much more time and money. Instead, they often form IXPs, typically as independent, not-for-profit associations. As well as managing traffic, IXPs have, in many — and especially developing — countries, formed the backbone of a flourishing technical community that further drives economic development.

Both between people and on the internet, connections are generative. From technical standards to common-pool resource management and even to more localized broadband networks known as “altnets,” internet rewilding already has a deep toolbox of collective action ready to be deployed.

The New Drive For Antitrust & Competition

The list of infrastructures to be diversified is long. As well as pipes and protocols, there are operating systems, browsers, search engines, the Domain Name System, social media, advertising, cloud providers, app stores, AI companies and more. And these technologies also intertwined.

But showing what can be done in one area creates opportunities in others. First, let’s start with regulation.

You don’t always need a big new idea like rewilding to frame and motivate major structural change. Sometimes reviving an old idea will do. President Biden’s 2021 “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy” revived the original, pro-worker, trust-busting scope and urgency of the early 20th-century legal activist and Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, along with rules and framings that date back to before the 1930s New Deal.

​ “Rewilding an already built environment isn’t just sitting back and seeing what tender, living thing can force its way through the concrete. It’s razing to the ground the structures that block out light for everyone not rich enough to live on the top floor.”

U.S. antitrust law was created to break the power of oligarchs in oil, steel and railroads who threatened America’s young democracy. It gave workers basic protections and saw equal economic opportunity as essential to freedom. This view of competition as essential was whittled away by Chicago School economic policies in the 1970s and Reagan-era judges’ court rulings over the decades. They believed intervention should only be permitted when monopoly power causes consumer prices to rise. The intellectual monoculture of that consumer-harm threshold has since spread globally.

It’s why governments just stood aside as 21st-century tech firms romped to oligopoly. If a regulator’s sole criterion for action is to make sure consumers don’t pay a penny more, then the free or data-subsidized services of tech platforms don’t even register. (Of course, consumers pay in other ways, as these tech giants exploit their personal information for profit.) This laissez-faire approach allowed the biggest firms to choke off competition by acquiring their competitors and vertically integrating service providers, creating the problems we have today.

Regulators and enforcers in Washington and Brussels now say they have learned that lesson and won’t allow AI dominance to happen as internet concentration did. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and U.S. Department of Justice antitrust enforcer, Jonathan Kanter, are identifying chokepoints in the AI “stack” — concentration in control of processing chips, datasets, computing capacity, algorithm innovation, distribution platforms and user interfaces — and analyzing them to see if they affect systemic competition. This is potentially good news for people who want to prevent the current dominance of tech giants being grandfathered into our AI future.

In his 2021 signing of the executive order on competition, President Biden said: “Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s exploitation.” Biden’s enforcers are changing the kinds of cases they take up and widening the applicable legal theories on harm that they bring to judges. Instead of the traditionally narrow focus on consumer prices, today’s cases argue that the economic harms perpetrated by dominant firms include those suffered by their workers, small companies and the market as a whole.

Khan and Kanter have jettisoned narrow and abstruse models of market behavior for real-world experiences of healthcare workers, farmers and writers. They get that shutting off economic opportunity fuels far-right extremism. They’ve made antitrust enforcement and competition policy explicitly about coercion versus choice, power versus democracy. Kanter told a recent conference in Brussels that “excessive concentration of power is a threat … it’s not just about prices or output but it’s about freedom, liberty and opportunity.”

Enforcers in Washington and Brussels are starting to preemptively block tech firms from using dominance in one realm to take over another. After scrutiny by the U.S. FTC and European Commission, Amazon recently abandoned its plan to acquire the home appliance manufacturer, iRobot. Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have also moved to stop Apple from using its iPhone platform dominance to squeeze app store competition and dominate future markets through, for example, pushing the usage of CarPlay on automakers and limiting access to its tap-to-pay digital wallet in the financial services sector.

Still, so far, their enforcement actions have focused on the consumer-facing, highly visible parts of the tech giants’ exploitative and proprietary internet. The few, narrow measures of the 2021 executive order that aim to reduce infrastructure-based monopolies, only prevent future abuses like radio spectrum-hogging, not those already locked in. Sure, the best way to deal with monopolies is to stop them from happening in the first place. But unless regulators and enforcers eradicate the existing dominance of these giants now, we’ll be living in today’s infrastructure monopoly for decades, perhaps even a century.

Even activist regulators have shied away from applying the toughest remedies for concentration in long-consolidated markets, such as non-discrimination requirements, functional interoperability and structural separations, i.e. breaking companies up. And declaring that search and social media monopolies are actually public utilities — and forcing them to act as common carriers open to all — is still too extreme for most.

But rewilding a built environment isn’t just sitting back and seeing what tender, living thing can force its way through the concrete. It’s razing to the ground the structures that block out light for everyone not rich enough to live on the top floor.

​ “Ecologists have reoriented their field as a ‘crisis discipline,’ a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same.”

When the writer and activist Cory Doctorow wrote about how to free ourselves from the clutches of Big Tech, he said that though breaking up big companies will likely take decades, providing strong and mandatory interoperability would open up innovative space and slow the flow of money to the largest firms — money they would otherwise use to deepen their moats.

Doctorow describes “comcom,” or competitive compatibility, as a kind of “guerrilla interoperability, achieved through reverse engineering, bots, scraping and other permissionless tactics.” Before a thicket of invasive laws sprung up to strangle it, comcom was how people figured out how to fix cars and tractors or re-write software. Comcom drives the try-every-tactic-until-one-works behavior you see in a flourishing ecosystem.

In an ecosystem, diversity of species is another way of saying “diversity of tactics,” as each successful new tactic creates a new niche to occupy. Whether it’s an octopus camouflaging itself as a sea snake, a cuckoo smuggling her chicks into another bird’s nest, orchids producing flowers that look just like a female bee, or parasites influencing rodent hosts to take life-ending risks, each evolutionary micro-niche is created by a successful tactic. Comcom is simply tactical diversity; it’s how organisms interact in complex, dynamic systems. And humans have demonstrated the epitome of short-term thinking by enabling the oligarchs who are trying to end it.

Efforts are underway. The EU already has several years of experience with interoperability mandates and precious insight into how determined firms work to circumvent such laws. The U.S., however, is still in its early days of ensuring software interoperability, for example, for videoconferencing.

Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.

Next Steps

Much of what we need is already here. Beyond regulators digging deep for courage, vision and bold new litigation strategies, we need vigorous, pro-competitive government policies around procurement, investments and physical infrastructure. Universities must reject research funding from tech firms because it always comes with conditions, both spoken and unspoken.

Instead, we need more publicly funded tech research with publicly released findings. Such research should investigate power concentration in the internet ecosystem and practical alternatives to it. We need to recognize that much of the internet’s infrastructure is a de facto utility that we must regain control of.

We must ensure regulatory and financial incentives and support for alternatives including common-pool resource management, community networks, and the myriad other collaborative mechanisms people have used to provide essential public goods like roads, defense and clean water.

All this takes money. Governments are starved of tax revenue by the once-in-history windfalls seized by today’s tech giants, so it’s clear where the money is. We need to get it back.

We know all this, but still find it so hard to collectively act. Why?

Herded into rigid tech plantations rather than functioning, diverse ecosystems, it’s tough to imagine alternatives. Even those who can see clearly may feel helpless and alone. Rewilding unites everything we know we need to do and brings with it a whole new toolbox and vision.

Ecologists face the same systems of exploitation and are organizing urgently, at scale and across domains. They see clearly that the issues aren’t isolated but are instances of the same pathology of command and control, extraction and domination that political anthropologist Scott first noticed in scientific forestry. The solutions are the same in ecology and technology: aggressively use the rule of law to level out unequal capital and power, then rush in to fill the gaps with better ways of doing things.

Keep The Internet, The Internet

Susan Leigh Star, a sociologist and theorist of infrastructure and networks, wrote in her 1999 influential paper, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure”:

“Study a city and neglect its sewers and power supplies (as many have), and you miss essential aspects of distributional justice and planning power. Study an information system and neglect its standards, wires, and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change.”

The technical protocols and standards that underlie the internet’s infrastructure are ostensibly developed in open, collaborative standards development organizations (SDOs), but are also increasingly under the control of a few companies. What appear to be “voluntary” standards are often the business choices of the biggest firms.

The dominance of SDOs by big firms also shapes what does not get standardized — for example, search, which is effectively a global monopoly. While efforts to directly address internet consolidation have been raised repeatedly within SDOs, little progress has been made. This is damaging SDOs’ credibility, especially outside the U.S. SDOs must radically change or they will lose their implicit global mandate to steward the future of the internet.

We need internet standards to be global, open and generative. They’re the wire models that give the internet its planetary form, the gossamer-thin but steely-strong threads holding together its interoperability against fragmentation and permanent dominance.

*Make Laws & Standards Work Together*

In 2018, a small group of Californians maneuvered the Legislature into passing the [California Consumer Privacy Act](https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa#:~:text=The California Consumer Privacy Act,how to implement the law.). Nested in the statute was an unassuming provision, the “right to opt out of sale or sharing” your personal information via a “user-enabled global privacy control” or GPC signal that would create an automated method for doing so. The law didn’t define how GPC would work. Because a technical standard was required for browsers, businesses and providers to speak the same language, the signal’s details were delegated to a group of experts.

In July 2021, California’s attorney general mandated that all businesses use the newly created GPC for California-based consumers visiting their websites. The group of experts is now shepherding the technical specification through global web standards development at the World Wide Web Consortium. For California residents, GPC automates the request to “accept” or “reject” sales of your data, such as cookie-based tracking, on its websites. However, it isn’t yet supported by major default browsers like Chrome and Safari. Broad adoption will take time, but it’s a small step in changing real-world outcomes by driving antimonopoly practices deep into the standards stack — and it’s already being [adopted](https://usercentrics.com/knowledge-hub/what-is-global-privacy-control/#:~:text=United States and state-level laws and GPC,-Six new data&text=The laws in California%2C Connecticut,to respect Global Privacy Control.) elsewhere.

GPC is not the first legally mandated open standard, but it was deliberately designed from day one to bridge policymaking and standards-setting. The idea is gaining ground. A recent United Nations Human Rights Council report recommends that states delegate “regulatory functions to standard-setting organizations.”

Make Service-Providers — Not Users — Transparent

Today’s internet offers minimal transparency of key internet infrastructure providers. For example, browsers are highly complex pieces of infrastructure that determine how billions of people use the web, yet they are provided for free. That’s because the most commonly used search engines enter into opaque financial deals with browsers, paying them to be set as the default. Since few people change their default search engine, browsers like Safari and Firefox make money by defaulting the search bar to Google, locking in its dominance even as the search engine’s quality of output declines.

This creates a quandary. If antitrust enforcers were to impose competition, browsers would lose their main source of income. Infrastructure requires money, but the planetary nature of the internet challenges our public funding model, leaving the door open to private capture. However, if we see the current opaque system as what it is, a kind of non-state taxation, then we can craft an alternative.

Search engines are a logical place for governments to mandate the collection of a levy that supports browsers and other key internet infrastructure, which could be financed transparently under open, transnational, multistakeholder oversight.

Make Space To Grow

We need to stop thinking of internet infrastructure as too hard to fix. It’s the underlying system we use for nearly everything we do. The former prime minister of Sweden, Carl Bildt, and former Canadian deputy foreign minister, Gordon Smith, wrote in 2016 that the internet was becoming “the infrastructure of all infrastructure.” It’s how we organize, connect and build knowledge, even — perhaps — planetary intelligence. Right now, it’s concentrated, fragile and utterly toxic.

Ecologists have reoriented their field as a “crisis discipline,” a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same. Rewilding the internet connects and grows what people are doing across regulation, standards-setting and new ways of organizing and building infrastructure, to tell a shared story of where we want to go. It’s a shared vision with many strategies. The instruments we need to shift away from extractive technological monocultures are at hand or ready to be built.

McDonald's AI Drive-Thru debacle is a warning to us all

By Joe Foley published 5 hours ago

Did it not test this?

We've mentioned before the risks for brands jumping on the AI bandwagon too quickly. And that extends beyond using AI image generators to any kind of customer-facing application, as McDonald's may have learned from its AI Drive Thru fiasco.

AI technology is advancing rapidly but remains in a state of relative infancy, and in many cases it just isn't good enough yet to implement without causing significant friction. The world's biggest fastfood brand has sensibly decided not to extend the contract on an AI voice recognition service and has told franchisees to remove the tech, but did it not think it should at least test it before it became the subject of viral videos?

Developed by IBM, McDonald's AI ordering system was implemented in over 100 McDonald's locations in the US starting back 2021. It was supposed to use voice recognition to process orders, but customers reported frequent frustrations, including quite spectacular order mixups, from bacon being added to ice cream to orders being hugely inflated.

In one video shared on TikTok with the caption "Fighting with McDonald's robot", the AI interpreted a woman's request for vanilla ice cream and a bottle of water to be an order for a caramel sundae and multiple sachets of ketchup and butter. In another, a customer inadvertently ordered 2,510 McNuggets Meals. That left a human attendant to have to reinput the order, rendering the AI a pointless frustration.

As reported by the trade publication Restaurant Business, McDonald's is removing the tech but remains determined to push forward with voice recognition technology to avoid having to employ humans to do the job of taking orders. The company said in a statement: "While there have been successes to date, we feel there is an opportunity to explore voice ordering solutions more broadly.

"After a thoughtful review, McDonald's has decided to end our current partnership with IBM on AOT (automated order taking) and the technology will be shut off in all restaurants currently testing it no later than 26 July, 2024."

This is far from the first case we've seen of experiments with AI resulting in a customer backlash. Lego is one of several brands to have apologised after using AI imagery. We've also seen branding agencies warn against AI washing, which is a tendency for companies to overstate their AI capabilities in order to make themselves look like part of the zeitgeist.

L’effondrement de l’information ?

Depuis Cambridge Analytica, Trump, le Brexit et le Covid, l’information est devenue un problème pour les réseaux sociaux… Sommés par les autorités d’arbitrer la vérité, la plupart d’entre eux semblent désormais se réfugier en-dehors de l’information, pour devenir des lieux d’accomplissement de soi rétifs à la politique. C’est certainement ce qui explique le recul de l’information dans les flux des utilisateurs, analyse pertinemment Charlie Warzel pour The Atlantic. Comme le déclarait récemment le New York Times : « Les principales plateformes en ligne sont en train de rompre avec l’information ».

Les plateformes de réseaux sociaux ont longtemps influencé la distribution de l’information, par exemple, en poussant les médias à se tourner vers la vidéo, comme l’a fait Facebook en 2015, en surestimant volontairement le temps moyen que les utilisateurs passaient à regarder des vidéos pour pousser les médias à basculer vers la production de contenus vidéos. Aujourd’hui, elles se détournent de l’information pour le divertissement et la publicité. Mais il n’y a pas qu’elles, les lecteurs eux-mêmes semblent atteindre un plafond informationnel, qui les pousse à se détourner de l’info, rapporte le Pew Research Center. La consommation d’information, particulièrement anxiogène, a plongé depuis 2020. Beaucoup se sont tournés vers des contenus plus faciles, comme ceux produits par les influenceurs. “La confiance des consommateurs ne repose pas nécessairement sur la qualité du reportage ou sur le prestige et l’histoire de la marque, mais sur des relations parasociales fortes”, constate Warzel. En 2014 – l’époque faste de l’actualité sociale – 75 % des adultes américains interrogés par le Pew déclaraient qu’Internet et les médias sociaux les avaient aidés à se sentir plus informés. Ce n’est plus le cas.

Avec l’accélération algorithmique de l’information dans les réseaux sociaux, les cycles d’actualité sont devenus plus rapides : Twitter est ainsi devenu le rédacteur en chef des sujets les plus chauds que les médias devaient traiter, dans une boucle de renforcement des sujets populaires, à l’image des tweets de Donald Trump que tous les médias commentaient. De 2013 à 2017, l’actualité est devenue l’essence faisant tourner les réseaux sociaux, transformant peu à peu l’information en champ de bataille… Beaucoup d’utilisateurs s’en sont alors détournés. De nouveaux réseaux sociaux ont explosé, à l’image de TikTok et les plus anciens réseaux se sont adaptés, Facebook notamment… Une récente enquête de Morning Consult a montré que « les gens aimaient davantage Facebook maintenant qu’il y avait moins d’actualité ».

Les commentaires sur l’actualité comme l’information ne vont pas entièrement disparaître, estime Warzel, mais les médias viennent de perdre de leur influence culturelle. Pour John Herrman dans le New Yorker, la campagne présidentielle de 2024 aux Etats-Unis risque d’être la première sans médias pour façonner les grands récits politiques. “Les réseaux sociaux ont fait ressortir le pire dans le secteur de l’information, et les informations, à leur tour, ont fait ressortir le pire dans de nombreux réseaux sociaux”. L’alliance entre réseaux sociaux et information a vécu. Reste à savoir ce que le monde de l’influence va produire… dans un monde où la force de l’écrit et la structuration de l’information semblent s’estomper du fait de machines à recommandation qui ne sont plus bâties pour eux.

La fin d’un monde commun
Dans un second article, Warzel revient sur cette disparition de l’information… Pour lui, l’internet est désormais fragmenté par les recommandations sociales qui font que nous ne partageons pas grand-chose de ce que les autres consomment. “La notion même de popularité est sujette à débat” : plus personne ne sait vraiment si telle tendance est aussi virale qu’affichée. Difficultés à comparer les métriques, recommandations opaques, fermeture des sites d’information par les paywalls, chute de la pertinence des informations sur les médias sociaux et envahissement publicitaire… Nous ne comprenons plus ce qu’il se passe en ligne. Vous n’avez probablement jamais vu les vidéos les plus populaires de TikTok de l’année, pas plus que les contenus les plus vus de Facebook ! Et pas grand monde n’avait parlé de l’émission la plus populaire de Netflix, The Night Agent ! D’un côté, les contenus populaires sont plus viraux que jamais, de l’autre ces popularités sont plus cloisonnées que jamais ! Les comparaisons d’audience entre contenus et plateformes deviennent particulièrement complexes à décoder. Par exemple, la polémique récente sur le succès d’audience auprès de jeunes américains d’un discours de Ben Laden n’a pas été aussi virale que beaucoup l’ont dit, comme l’ont démontré le Washington Post ou Ryan Broderick. Un peu comme si nous étions entrés dans un moment de grande confusion sur la viralité, avec des métriques de vues que l’on compare d’une plateforme l’autre, alors que leurs publics et principes d’auto-renforcement sont très différents. Le fait que les plateformes ferment l’accès à leurs métriques et à la recherche n’aide pas à y voir clair, bien sûr. Sans échelle de comparaison, sans moyens pour voir ce qui circule et comment, nous devenons aveugles à tous les phénomènes. Et notamment à l’un d’entre eux : la manipulation de l’information par des puissances étrangères…

Ces transformations ne sont pas encore achevées ni digérées qu’une autre se profile, estimait James Vincent pour The Verge : “l’ancien web est en train de mourir et le nouveau web a du mal à naître”. La production de textes, d’images, de vidéos et de sons synthétiques vient parasiter cet écosystème en recomposition. Accessibles directement depuis les moteurs de recherches, les productions de l’IA viennent remplacer le trafic qui menait jusqu’à l’information. “L’IA vise à produire du contenu bon marché depuis le travail d’autrui”. Bing AI ou Bard de Google pourraient finalement venir tuer l’écosystème qui a fait la valeur des moteurs de recherche, en proposant eux-même leur propre “abondance artificielle”. Certes, ce ne sera pas la première fois que l’écosystème de l’information se modifie : Wikipédia a bien tué l’Encyclopédie Britannica. Mais, pour James Vincent, si depuis l’origine le web structure la grande bataille de l’information en modifiant les producteurs, les modalités d’accès et les modèles économiques… cette nouvelle configuration qui s’annonce ne garantit pas que le système qui arrive soit meilleur que celui que nous avions.

“L’internet n’est plus amusant”, déplorait Kyle Chayka pour le New Yorker. A force d’ajustements algorithmiques, les réseaux sociaux sont devenus parfaitement chiants !, expliquait Marie Turcan de Numérama, dénonçant le web de l’ennui ! L’invisibilisation des liens externes et plus encore de l’écrit par rapport à la vidéo, semble achever ce qu’il restait de qualité, comme le rapporte David-Julien Rahmil pour l’ADN. Dans un autre article, Rahmil rappelle que les échanges directs ont pris le pas sur les échanges publics : “La publicité omniprésente, l’exacerbation des tensions politiques, la culture du clash perpétuel et la sensation de burn-out informationnel ont sans doute précipité la chute des grandes plateformes sociales.” Désormais, chaque plateforme ne travaille plus que pour elle-même. Dans une internet plus fragmenté que jamais, chaque plateforme va faire émerger ses propres professionnels, ses propres influenceurs et il est bien probable qu’ils ne se recoupent plus d’une plateforme l’autre.

Quant aux réseaux sociaux, ils se sont dévalorisés eux-mêmes, à l’image de Twitter, qui a longtemps incarné le fil d’actualité en temps réel, le lieu central d’une conversation influente et un peu élitiste, explique Nilay Patel pour The Verge. C’est “l’effondrement du contexte qui a rendu Twitter si dangereux et si réducteur, mais c’était aussi ce qui le rendait passionnant”. La plateforme a rendu ses utilisateurs plus rapides et plus agiles, mais également trop réactifs. Les marques se sont éloignées des médias pour gérer elles-mêmes leurs présences sociales. “En prenant du recul maintenant, vous pouvez voir exactement à quel point cette situation a été destructrice pour le journalisme : les journalistes du monde entier ont fourni gratuitement à Twitter des informations et des commentaires en temps réel, apprenant de plus en plus à façonner des histoires pour l’algorithme plutôt que pour leurs véritables lecteurs. Pendant ce temps, les sociétés de médias pour lesquelles ils travaillaient étaient confrontées à un exode de leurs plus gros clients publicitaires vers des plateformes sociales offrant des produits publicitaires de meilleure qualité et plus intégrés, une connexion directe avec le public et aucune éthique éditoriale contraignante. Les informations sont devenues de plus en plus petites, même si les histoires ont pris de l’ampleur.” Tout le monde y était journaliste, alors que le secteur de l’information lui-même se tarissait. “Twitter a été fondé en 2006. Depuis cette année-là, l’emploi dans les journaux a chuté de 70% et les habitants de plus de la moitié des comtés américains ont peu ou plus d’informations locales”. Avec la pandémie, Trump, Black Live Matter, Twitter a atteint un point de bascule, s’effondrant sous son propre pouvoir. L’audience a commencé à refluer sous sa toxicité. Pour Patel, la prise de pouvoir de Musk sur la plateforme est une réaction au recul du pouvoir des célébrités et des gens de la tech. En renforçant sa viralité et sa toxicité, la plateforme ne cesse de péricliter. Les challengers (Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon…) sont à Twitter “ce que la méthadone est à l’héroïne”. L’audience est plus fragmentée que jamais. A l’image de ces utilisateurs qui courent encore d’une plateforme l’autre pour envoyer des messages à leurs relations… ou ces lecteurs désorientés de ne plus trouver quoi lire.

Changement générationel ou enjunkification ?**
**L’âge de la conversation qui ouvrait le web du XXIe siècle est clos ! Et ce qu’il reste de nos conversations vont être prises en charge par des agents conversationnels… qui seront des des agents politiques et idéologiques bien plus efficaces que nos semblables, comme l’explique Olivier Ertzscheid ! A terme, c’est même une relation encore plus personnelle à l’information que dessinent les chatbots, chacun discutant avec le sien sans plus vraiment avoir de liens à des contenus communs.

Pour Max Read, dans le New York Times, peut-être faut-il lire ces changements en cours autrement. Ces transformations ont aussi des origines économiques, rappelle-t-il trop rapidement. “La fin de l’ère des taux d’intérêt bas a bouleversé l’économie des start-ups, mettant fin aux pratiques de croissance rapide comme le blitzscaling et réduisant le nombre de nouvelles entreprises Internet en lice pour attirer notre attention ; des entreprises comme Alphabet et Facebook sont désormais des entreprises matures et dominantes au lieu de nouvelles entreprises perturbatrices”… Pourtant, plutôt que de creuser cette explication économique, c’est à une autre explication que Max Read se range. Si l’internet est en train de mourir, c’est d’abord parce que nous vieillissons. La forme et la culture d’internet ont été façonnés par les préférences des générations qui y ont pris part. L’internet d’aujourd’hui n’est plus celui des médias sociaux (2000-2010), ni celui des réseaux sociaux (2010-2020). “Selon le cabinet d’études de consommation GWI, le temps passé devant un écran par les millennials est en baisse constante depuis des années. Seuls 42 % des 30 à 49 ans déclarent être en ligne « presque constamment », contre 49 % des 18 à 29 ans. Nous ne sommes même plus les premiers à l’adopter : les 18 à 29 ans sont plus susceptibles d’avoir utilisé ChatGPT que les 30 à 49 ans – mais peut-être uniquement parce que nous n’avons plus de devoirs à faire.”

“Le public américain le plus engagé sur Internet ne sont plus les millennials mais nos successeurs de la génération Z. Si Internet n’est plus amusant pour les millennials, c’est peut-être simplement parce que ce n’est plus notre Internet. Il appartient désormais aux zoomers.”

Les formats, les célébrités, le langage lui-même de cette génération est totalement différent, explique Read. “Les zoomers et les adolescents de la génération Alpha qui mordillent leurs talons générationnels semblent toujours s’amuser en ligne. Même si je trouve tout cela impénétrable et un peu irritant, l’expression créative et la socialité exubérante qui ont rendu Internet si amusant pour moi il y a dix ans sont en plein essor parmi les jeunes de 20 ans sur TikTok, Instagram, Discord, Twitch et même X. Skibidi Toilet, Taxe Fanum, le rizzler – je ne me rabaisserai pas en prétendant savoir ce que sont ces mèmes, ou quel est leur attrait, mais je sais que les zoomers semblent les aimer. Ou, en tout cas, je peux vérifier qu’ils adorent les utiliser pour confondre et aliéner les millennials d’âge moyen comme moi.”

Certes, ils sont récupérés et exploités par une petite poignée de plateformes puissantes, mais d’autres avant elles ont cherché à arbitrer et à marchandiser notre activité en ligne… “Les plateformes axées sur l’engagement ont toujours cultivé les influenceurs, les abus et la désinformation. Lorsque vous approfondissez, ce qui semble avoir changé sur le Web au cours des dernières années, ce n’est pas la dynamique structurelle mais les signifiants culturels”.

“En d’autres termes, l’enjunkification a toujours eu lieu sur le web commercial, dont le modèle économique largement basé sur la publicité semble imposer une course toujours mouvante vers le bas. Peut-être que ce que les internautes frustrés, aliénés et vieillissants comme moi vivent ici, ce ne sont pas seulement les fruits d’un Internet enjunkifié, mais aussi la perte de l’élasticité cognitive, du sens de l’humour et de l’abondance de temps libre nécessaire pour naviguer avec agilité et gaieté dans tous ces déchets déroutants.”

Mais c’est là une vision très pessimiste des transformations actuelles. Pour Rolling Stone, Anil Dash s’enthousiasme. Avec sa fragmentation, l’internet est en train de redevenir bizarre, comme il l’était à l’origine ! La disparition d’applications centrales (même si ce n’est pas vraiment tout à fait le cas), promet un retour de services étranges et de propositions inattendues à l’image de l’école de la programmation poétique de Neta Bomani… ou celles du constructeur de bots Stephan Bohacek, ou encore celles du designer Elan Kiderman Ullendorff qui s’amuse à faire des propositions pour “échapper aux algorithmes“… ou encore les petites subversions de l’artiste et programmeur Darius Kazemi qui proposait aux gens de créer leurs micro-réseaux sociaux autonomes sur Mastodon…

Pas sûr que ces subversions n’aient jamais cessé. Elles ont surtout été invisibilisées par les grandes plateformes sociales. Pas sûr que l’audience d’influence et que l’audience synthétique qui s’annoncent ne leur apporte plus d’espaces qu’ils n’en avaient hier. Reste qu’Anil Dash a raison : la seule chose certaine, c’est que les contenus les plus étranges vont continuer de tenter de parvenir jusqu’à nous. A l’image des vidéos qui venaient coloniser les flux des plus jeunes depuis quelques mots clefs, que dénonçait James Bridle dans son excellent livre, Un nouvel âge des ténèbres. Elan Kiderman Ullendorff s’est amusé à créer un compte tiktok des vidéos les plus repoussantes qui lui étaient proposées en passant toutes celles qui l’intéressaient et en ne retenant que le pire. Des vidéos qui semblent composer un portrait de Dorian Gray de chacun d’entre nous. Le web addictif est le miroir du web répulsif, le web qu’on déteste le miroir du web de nos rêves. Seule certitude, oui : le web de demain risque d’être bien plus étrange et dérangeant qu’il n’est ! Les ajustements algorithmiques ayant sabré le plus intéressant, il est probable que nous soyons plus que jamais confrontés au pire !

Hubert Guillaud

Social Media Messed Up Our Kids. Now It Is Making Us Ungovernable.

Jonathan Haidt talks to Noema about “The Anxious Generation” and how technology is upending democracy.

InterviewDigital Society June 13, 2024

In a conversation with Noema editor-in-chief Nathan Gardels, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt discusses the impact of social media on truth in politics, the mental health crisis of today’s youth, and what to do about it.

Nathan Gardels: For those who haven’t read your book, “The Anxious Generation,” can you summarize the main thesis?

Jonathan Haidt: It all begins with a mystery: Why is it that mental health statistics for American teenagers were pretty flat, with no sign of any problem, from the late ’90s through 2010 to 2011? That is true whether we look at depression, anxiety or self-harm. And then, all of a sudden, in 2012, it’s as though someone flipped a switch, and the girls began getting much more anxious, depressed and self-harming. It was true of boys too, but it’s not been so sudden. It was more gradual in the early 2010s.

We first discovered this on college campuses because the students who entered universities from 2014 to 2015 were very different from our stereotype of college students who want to have fun, who want to drink and party.

The students arriving in 2014 to 15 were much more anxious. And they were especially triggered by words or jokes, speakers or books. It was that observation that led Greg Lukianoff to propose the hypothesis that college is doing something to kids to make them think in this distorted way. That was the basis of our book “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

But now it’s becoming clearer that what we saw and wrote about in that book wasn’t just happening to college students, but actually to all teenagers born after 1995. And it was not only observable in the U.S., Britain and Canada but a lot of other countries as well. What happened? Why was it so sudden? So that’s the mystery.

Was it some chemical dropped in the water supply all over North America and Northern Europe, along with the South Pacific? Or was it the massive change in the technological environment of childhood in all these countries simultaneously? This seemed the obvious hypothesis.

So, the first chapter of “The Anxious Generation” discusses what actually happened to teen mental health. And then the rest of the book seeks to unravel the mystery. It’s not just about “social media is destroying everybody.” It’s a more subtle and interesting story about the transformation of childhood — a tragedy that occurred in three acts.

Act I, which I only hinted at in the book, was the loss of community. So, if you look at America, especially in the years just after World War II, social capital was very high. The best way to make people trust each other is to have someone attack them from the outside — come together, fight a war and win. Social capital was very high in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s, and then it begins to drop over succeeding decades for many reasons.

Robert Putnam talked about this in “Bowling Alone.” You have smaller family sizes; people retreat inside because now they have air conditioning and TV and they’re not out in the front yard socializing as much. So, for a lot of reasons, we begin to lose trust in each other. We begin to lose social capital. That’s Act I of the tragedy.

Because of that, Act II happens, which is when we take away play-based childhood. Children used to always play together. It didn’t matter if it was raining or snowing, if there was a crime wave or drunk drivers, kids went out to play. Like all mammals, we evolved to play, in order to wire up our relatively large brains.

But in the ’90s, we decided it was too dangerous for kids to be out and about. They’ll get kidnapped or sexually abused, we thought, because we no longer trusted our neighbors. So, we locked our kids up out of fear of each other. In other words, over protection. This is the coddling part.

Then, after losing strong communities and play-based childhoods, we’re ready for the third act in the tragedy: the massive, sudden transformation of childhood between 2010 and 2015 into a phone-based childhood.

In 2010, the vast majority of teens across the developed world had cell phones. But they were flip phones or basic phones, with no internet browser. All you could do with them is text and call. That was pretty much it aside from some games. It wasn’t for constant communication. And that’s good. Kids could text their friends and say, “Let’s meet up at 3 p.m.” It was a simple tool. There was very little high-speed internet then and no front-facing camera. There was Facebook, but no Instagram. That’s the way things were in 2010.

“All of a sudden, in 2012, it’s as though someone flipped a switch, and the girls began getting much more anxious, depressed and self-harming.”

In 2010, kids in the U.S. and other Anglo countries still had a recognizably human childhood. They would meet up in person, even if they now had less freedom to roam. By 2015, that all changed when about 80% of those kids had a smartphone with a front-facing camera and a bunch of social media apps. So now we have the selfie culture. Almost everyone now has high-speed internet and now everyone can display video.

In short, by 2015 we have what I call “the great rewiring of childhood.” And that’s why in 2012, which is the year, incidentally, that Facebook bought Instagram, when online life changed, especially for girls, who flocked onto Instagram. And it was right after that when we first noticed the widespread upsurge in anxiety, depression and self-harm.

Gardels: The main criticism of your thesis is that you are mistaking correlation for cause and being too technologically determinist. How do you respond to that?

Haidt: First of all, my story is not just about technology, it is sociological. It’s a cultural psychology story. It’s about the change of childhood and human development.

To those who argue these changes could have been caused by any number of factors, I say a couple of things. First, whatever other factor you might think was more determinative, did that happen in New Zealand and Iceland and Australia all at the same time? No one can identify such a factor. Nobody has proposed an alternative theory that works internationally.

Second, it is true that the data is mostly correlational. If you have 300 correlational studies and 25 experimental studies, I would say the data is mostly correlational. The scientific debate has been focused on a very, very narrow question: Do the hours spent on social media tell you anything about the level of mental illness, especially depression and anxiety? There’s a clear correlation in these studies.

But we also have experimental studies, which I cite in the book. I go into great detail about the difference between correlation and causation. Every week, every month, we have more experiments indicating the causality of anxiety-inducing technology.

There are so many causal pathways by which a phone-based childhood harms different kids in different ways. Let me just take the example of sextortion, a very common crime online. There are international sextortion gangs that display avatars of beautiful, sexy young women. An avatar flirts with a boy that she finds, usually on Instagram. And then she convinces him to swap nude images. Boom. Then the sextortionist reveals himself, not as a sexy girl but as a man who now has all the content he needs to ruin you: “I’m going to show this picture of you and your penis to everyone, because I have all your contacts, unless you pay me $500 in two hours.”

The boys panic, and some of them have killed themselves because of the shame. The FBI has identified 20 suicides that were direct results of sextortion, which means there are probably hundreds of cases they didn’t catch, and far more kids who were traumatized by the experience and the shame. Now, is that just a correlation? Would these boys have killed themselves anyway, even if they had not been sextorted? I don’t think so.

Gardels: What are the specific remedies you propose for parents to protect their kids?

Haidt: The key to the whole book is understanding collective action problems, which are sometimes referred to as “the tragedy of the commons,” where each person acting in their own interest ends up bringing about an outcome that’s bad for everyone. If you’re the only one who doesn’t put your sheep out to graze, if you’re the only one who doesn’t fish in the pond, you suffer while everyone else continues to do what they’re doing.

One of the main reasons that we all are giving our kids phones now at age nine or 10 — it gets younger all the time — is because the kid comes home from school and says, “Mom, everyone else has an iPhone, I have to have an iPhone, or I’ll be left out.”

This is a collective action problem because any parent who does the right thing and says, “No, you’re not going to get one until you’re mostly done with puberty,” is imposing a cost on their child. All over the developed world now, family life has devolved into a struggle over screen time and phones. This is terrible. So, the trick is to realize we’re in this problem because everybody else is in this problem.

“All over the developed world now, family life has devolved into a struggle over screen time and phones.”

We’re so deep into this that it is very hard for any family to get out of it by themselves. Some parents are tough and just say “no,” but the status environment doesn’t change for the kids.

What I’m trying to do with the book is to say, if we team up with a few other families, if a small group of parents can get the whole school or school district to say “no,” then they escape and we can change the situation very, very quickly.

What we need is the adoption of four norms that can break the back of the collective action problem.

One: No smartphone before high school. Just keep it out of middle school. Let the kids at least get through early puberty, which is the most sensitive period. You can give them a flip phone if you absolutely need to text. I understand the need to coordinate.

Two: No social media before the age of 16. Social media is entirely inappropriate for children, it cannot be made appropriate because what you’re basically doing is saying, “How about we let the entire world get in touch with you? Let’s let all the companies try to sell things to you, let men all over the world who want to have sex with you contact you, and try to trick you into sending photos.” There’s no way to make this safe. So just recognize that social media is a tool for adults. Eleven-year-olds don’t need to network with strangers.

Third: Schools need to be phone-free. Imagine that when I was a kid growing up in the ’70s, if we had been allowed to bring in our television sets and our radios along with all sorts of toys and games and put them on our desk and use them during class. That’s what teachers are facing today. Disgusted and frustrated that they can’t get through to students, teachers are quitting.

Also, global test scores have been dropping, since 2012. This did not begin with Covid. It began around 2012. The result is a massive destruction of human capital. So, it’s just kind of obvious. You can’t have kids have the greatest distraction device ever invented in their pockets while they’re in class. All kids must check their phones during the day. If others are texting, they have to be texting back. So, just lock up the phone in the morning to give it back at the end of the day.

Four: We need to restore a play-based childhood. Kids need more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. If you’re going to roll back the phone and don’t restore play, a child can have no childhood. So, roll it back and instead, give them adventure and fun with other kids.

Us parents need to overcome our own fears and let our children learn how to play with each other. Kids playing in groups are very safe. That’s how they learn to get along. That’s how they’re going to resolve disputes in life.

If we do these four things I’m pretty confident that rates of mental illness will come down within two years. Experience so far shows that phone-free schools get great results within a month. In various childhood independence projects, you get results within a month. If any community does all four of these, I believe they’re going to see pretty big drops in depression, anxiety, self-harm and other problems in short order.

Gardels: Do you worry that more prosperous parents with the means and time to be attentive to their kids will follow your advice, while the less well-off, busy working two jobs with less time for their kids, won’t? That this will just create a greater gap in society?

Haidt: Yes, I do expect that it will begin this way, with the most educated and wealthy families. But I think it will spread quickly as parents begin to see and hear about the benefits. Also, I should note that the most educated families apply the most limits, whereas children in low socioeconomic status, single-parent, or Black or Hispanic families have one- to two- hours more screen time per day, so going phone-free will disproportionately help them.

Gardels: Implicit in your remarks is you don’t have any faith in the Instagrams or TikToks of the world to be able to regulate themselves so they do less harm?

“What we need is the adoption of four norms that can break the back of the collective action problem.”

Haidt: Right now, as long as you’re old enough to lie about your age, you can go to Pornhub. You can open 20 Instagram accounts, you can open TikTok accounts. The law says you have to be 13 to sign a contract with a company to give away your data without your parents’ knowledge. But the law is written in such a way that there’s no responsibility for the companies if they don’t know your real age. As long as they don’t know your real age, they can’t be held liable for serving you eating disorder content or sex and violence.

We’re talking about five to 10 companies here that own our children’s childhood. They have a lot more influence over our kids than we do in some ways. And they have no responsibility. They are literally protected from lawsuits by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields them from liability for the content on their platforms.

This is a completely insane situation. And they’re making huge amounts of money. So no, I don’t expect them to do anything until they’re forced by legislation, or by enormous losses in court.

Gardels: Your book has obviously hit a chord with parents and with school authorities. Do you have any sense of how the TikTok crowd or kids themselves see it?

Haidt: When you survey kids who’ve been through this, it’s really hard to find members of Gen Z who are opposed to what I’m saying. In fact, I actually haven’t found any. They almost always say, “Yeah, you know, you’re right. This really messed us up. But, you know, what are you going to do? This is just the way things are, and I can’t quit because everyone else is on.” There’s just an extraordinary sense of fatalism. We don’t find any young people organizing to protect their rights to have these things. The older kids generally say, if we could get everyone off, we should do that.

Gardels: The Chinese cyberspace authorities have no qualms about imposing limits on social media. Here are the rules:

• Children under 8: Can only use smart devices for 40 minutes per day and can only consume content about “elementary education, hobbies and interests, and liberal arts education”
• Children aged 8 to 15: Can use their phone for no more than one hour per day
• Children aged 16 to 17: Can use a handset for a maximum of two hours per day
• Minor mode: Requires mobile devices, apps and app stores to have a built-in mode that would bar users under 18 from accessing the internet on mobile devices from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Perhaps they will produce more mentally healthy kids?

Haidt: China is engaged in a battle with the United States for cultural and economic supremacy. Since our young people are giving away all of their available attention, there’s a good chance that they will be less creative and less productive. They don’t have any spare attention to actually do anything. I imagine that makes the Chinese government happy.

The worst single product for American children is TikTok. It sucks up more of their time, energy and attention than any other product. And it harms them. It doesn’t do anything good for them. TikTok has more influence over our kids than any other organization on the planet. So, there are many reasons to think that that is a danger not only to our kids, but to our country.

It seems the Chinese are doing the right thing by using their authoritarian system to reduce the damage to their own children.

Of course, authoritarian solutions are not right for us, but we can do similar things through democratic solutions, through community and civil society. One thing Tocqueville praised Americans about is that when something needs doing, say the townspeople need to build a bridge, they just do it. They don’t wait for the state like in France. They don’t wait for the King like in Britain. Americans come together as citizens, elect a leader, raise money and then they do it.

So, I’m hopeful that my book presents norms that we adopt ourselves, even if we never get any help from Congress or lawmakers. Doing it ourselves — in groups of parents organized around schools — is a very American solution to what I think is one of the largest problems facing America today.

“TikTok has more influence over our kids than any other organization on the planet.”

Gardels: To go back to the coddled generation argument. What do you make of all these kids in college today putting up barricades, occupying administration buildings protesting the war in Gaza?

Haidt: Most of the activism of the college kids has moved online. That tends to be very ineffective and creates a culture that is bad for activists. I put some research in the book showing that before 2010, being politically active was actually associated with better mental health. You were engaged, you were part of a group, you were energized. After 2010, activists, especially progressive activists, are the least happy people in the country. They are marinating in beliefs about oppressor versus victim and embracing the untruths of the coddled. That was certainly true until very recently.

Now it’s true these protests are in person. That’s at least better psychologically for them. They are physically present and interacting with others on campus.

Even so, I think there are signs that it’s different from previous generations. One is that the present protestors are expecting accommodation, often seeking not to be punished for missing classes and for delayed exams. In other words, they are expecting a low cost to themselves. In previous periods of activism, civil disobedience meant if you break the law, then you pay the consequences to show how committed you are to the cause.

To be sure, today’s actions are communal, which is always very exciting. It’s not as though Gen Z is incapable of acting in person; though, I would point out, it’s overwhelmingly at the elite schools that this is happening.

Gardels: One of the reasons that we have such a paralyzed and polarized society is that the public square has virtually disappeared. Until social media turbocharged fragmentation, there was a common space where competing ideas could be contested in the full gaze of the body politic.

As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han has observed, the peer-to-peer connectivity of social media redirects the flow of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public.

The possibility of arriving at a governing consensus through negotiation and compromise is being shattered by a cacophony of niche propagandists egging on their own siloed tribe of the faithful to engage in an endless partisan battle. Indeed, Rene DiResta at Stanford calls the niche ideologues “the new media goliaths” who have supplanted mainstream platforms in terms of influence.

In short, the digital media ecosystem is disempowering the public sphere.

In this sense, social media is not only messing up our kids but undermining the basis of democratic discourse.

Do you agree with that?

Haidt: Absolutely. In an article for the Atlantic in 2019, I made the case, basically along the lines of Han, that massive changes in information flows and the way we connect people change the fundamental ground within which our democratic institutions are operating. And it’s quite possible that we are now so far outside the operating range of these institutions that they will fail.

I’m extremely alarmed about the future of this country. If you read Federalist #10, the Founding Fathers, who were excellent social psychologists, were very afraid of the passions of the people. They didn’t want us to have a direct democracy. They wanted cooling mechanisms of deliberation through reason. The system of governance they devised, with its checks and balances, is really like a complicated clock that they thought could last a very long time precisely because it was realistic about human frailties. And they were right.

Then all of a sudden in the later post-war era — first with television, then the internet and, especially, now peer-to-peer media, it is all going awry. With television, at least there were editors. Jonathan Rauch wrote an amazing book called “The Constitution of Knowledge,” both about the Constitution and how knowledge is constituted.

He discussed how we make knowledge in universities and science and medicine. But he also discussed the U.S. Constitution and how the community of knowledge makers are governed by certain rules and checks and balances. We developed editors, filters and other mechanisms to vet truth.

All that’s going away now. Or at least the institutions are so weakened as to be feeble. I’m very alarmed. And, at the same time, what’s replacing them are the sorts of peer-to-peer networks that you’re talking about.

“Until social media turbocharged fragmentation, there was a common space where competing ideas could be contested in the full gaze of the body politic.”

In the history of humanity, when you connect people, there could be disruptions. But in the long run, that’s good. It increases the flow of knowledge and increases creativity. You get more value when you connect people. So, the telephone was great, the postal system was great.

Social media is not like those earlier innovations. I think the best metaphor here is to imagine a public square in which people talk to each other. They debate ideas or put forth ideas that may not always be brilliant. They may not always be civil, but people can speak while others listen. Sometimes people are moved by persuasion or dissuasion.

I think the Founding Fathers assumed that’s about the best we can hope for. Imagine one day, and I’ll call it 2009, that all changes. There’s no more public square. Everything takes place in the center of the Roman Colosseum. The stands are full of people who are there to see blood. That’s what they came for. They don’t want to see the lion and the Christian making nice; they want the one to kill the other. That’s what Twitter is often like.

It all becomes performative and comes at a superfast pace. Just as television changed the way we are and made us into passive consumers, the central act in social media is posting, judging, criticizing and joining mobs. Donald Trump is the quintessential person who thrives in that environment. If not for Twitter, Trump never could have been president. So, when our politics moved into the Roman Colosseum, I think the Founding Fathers would have said, “Let’s just give up. There’s no way we can build a democracy in this environment.”

Gardels: Just as republics have historically created institutional checks and balances when too much power is concentrated in one place, so too don’t we need to foster checks and balances for an age when power is so distributed that the public sphere is disempowered?

What I have in mind are the citizens’ assemblies indicative of the public as a whole, which deliberate issues in a non-partisan environment and, outside the electoral sphere where partisans vie for power by any means necessary, are able to come to a consensus through pragmatic, common sense solutions?

Haidt: It’s possible to create these small artificial communities where you lock citizens away together for a week and have them discuss something. They work pretty well from what I know, and they come up with solutions. But it’s not clear to me how you could use that to run a country. The way people feel about let’s say, Donald Trump, has very little to do with some ascertainment of fact.

If you use the word power, then I’m a little bit confused. But I think I see what you’re getting at. If we change the word to authority, it is clearer to me. When I wrote “The Righteous Mind,” I was on the left then and really tried to understand conservatives. Reading conservative writings, especially Edmund Burke and Thomas Sowell, was really clarifying on the idea that we need institutions. We need religion, we need gods, even if it is not true. We need moral order and constraint.

The progressive impulse is to tear things down and make things new. The conservative impulse is to protect authority structures because we need them. Without them, we have chaos. Of course, there are times to tear things down. But I think during the 2010s everything has been torn down, to some extent. This is a time we need to build.

I am very concerned that there is no longer any source of authority. There is no trusted authority, there is no way to find consensus on truth. It seems that the truth-seeking mechanisms, including the courts, came up with the answer that the last presidential election in the U.S. was not stolen. But there’s no real way to spread that around to the large portion of society that believes that it was.

With AI coming in, the problem of the loss of authority is going to be magnified tenfold or even a hundredfold when anyone can create a video of anyone saying anything in that person’s voice. It’s going to be almost impossible to know what’s true. We’re in for a wild ride if we’re going to try to run a democratic republic with no real authority. My fear is that we will simply become ungovernable. I hope not, I hope we find a way to adapt to living in our world after the fall of the tower of Babel, the fall of common understandings and common language.

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.