A.I. thinks I’ve only got one ear

I will explain the title for this post at the end (I think that’s called click bait) but first things first. Kudos to Netflix, they have now made three impactful documentaries exposing the dangers of AI driven manipulation of data for society and our civil liberties. These malgorithms are what Cathy O’Neil, who features heavily in one of the films, calls ‘Weapons of Math Destruction’. First came ‘The Great Hack’ in 2019 which exposed the deeply disturbing scandal of Cambridge Analytica and their manipulation of voter behaviour using data facebook had provided resulting in Mark Zuckerberg having to appear in front of Congressional hearings. The following year two more films were debuted by Netflix, first ‘The Social Dilemma’ then ‘Coded Bias’.

I wrote an eBook about my reaction to ‘The Social Dilemma’. TSD focused on how social media was being driven by venal amoral algorithms designed to maximize advertising revenues. These algorithms learn that the best way to do this is to feed people, to hook them like addicts, on content that pandered to their prurience, prejudices and psychoses. The result, the unintended consequence, is an increase mental illness especially among the young, bias confirmation and, most concerningly for liberal democracies, polarization of opinion to the point where rational debate is all but extinguished. So I chose to write my eBook as a contribution to a more rational – Socratic – discussion based on some small scale research I conducted among opinion leaders and on the basis of this I attempted to offer possible solutions. I’ll come back to those.

The third Netflix documentary of 2020, following closely on the heels of TSD, was ‘Coded Bias’ directed by Shalini Kantayya and featuring Joy Buolamwini among many other experts and activists, mostly women from diverse backgrounds. This was entirely appropriate since Joy’s work which she carried out at MIT exposed how facial recognition surveillance powered by AI was reinforcing racial and gender bias. The efforts of Joy Buolamwini, Cathy O’Neil and other prominent activists like Silkie Carlo founder of ‘Big Brother Watch’ in the UK have had some notable successes in forcing governments and law enforcement agencies to curtail the use of facial recognition surveillance. However, there remains widespread commercial use of AI that affects peoples chances of gaining employment, housing, credit, insurance, healthcare based on algorithms that are unregulated and flawed, in particular AI that been shown to be negatively biased against the poor, the racial minorities and the unconventional. AI is therefore reinforcing social inequality, preventing social mobility and restricting individual self-expression. This is just as terrifying as the manipulation of social media to change not just what we think but the way we think, our most fundamental human right, and the manipulation of elections, an attack on the very foundation of democracy.

All of this has been exposed in three documentaries produced by Netflix. Amazon and Apple both make lots of documentaries but none so far on the dangers of big data and AI. One wonders why……… but as I say, kudos to Netflix. I guess in the case of Netflix they use algorithms only to commission new content for you, and to suggest available content to you, that they think you might like, more like weapons of Individual entertainment than mass destruction.

I said I would return to potential solutions to this AI challenge and we need solutions because we do want, we desperately need, the positive use of AI to help us take on the Herculean tasks of tackling climate change, food poverty, obtaining better health opportunities for all.  As an atheist I don’t believe we were created by God but many of those who do also believe we were created in his/her/their likeness. They explain away humanity’s capacity to do as much evil as good as God giving us free will. Perhaps God did create us to be just like him/her/them and perhaps having given us free will he/she/they did not fully understand the ramifications of that until it became too late to do anything about it. This seems to be the perfect metaphor for AI. We created it and we gave it lots of data about us so it could think like us, maybe be better than us, certainly a lot faster than us. AI can only learn from big data (which remember means not just lots of it but multi-source). The biases that ‘Coded Bias’ talks about happened because the data we gave the AI to learn from was skewed to, let’s call it, ‘white privilege’. So we created AI to be like us, but only some of us, and we allowed it to develop in ways that were both good and bad for the world, just like us, and it is in danger of getting out of control, just like us. So how do we do better than God? How do we get AI back under control and how do we direct it towards things that are good for a free and open society, a world of equal opportunity for all irrespective of class, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, faith (personally I’m not so sure about the last of those given the religious extremists out there but maybe with AI we can sort them out too)?

China is on a very different agenda it must be said. They are 100% explicit that they do not agree with democracy and that they want to use AI and data to control their society. There is no secret to what China are doing with data and facial recognition, we saw this in Hong Kong in response to the people who dared to challenge the state. In China you get a Social Credit Score, like a financial credit score but all encompassing. If you do the wrong thing, if you say the wrong thing, even if people you know do or say something wrong you are punished and the state, the CCP will know exactly what you are doing and saying, where you go and with whom you are consorting because they have all your data. The state can control you by controlling your Social Credit Score and thereby restricting your ability to get housing, access to public transport & travel, healthcare, financial services, you name it.

That makes them terrible, right? China is much worse than the free Western democracies – but is it? Of the 9 major organizations developing big data AI, 3 are in China and 6 are in the USA. Exactly the same thing is happening in America as in China with two important differences a) you don’t know about it, it’s invisible and b) the power lies in the hands of these few huge commercial enterprises who care first and foremost about profit and shareholders. People are denied jobs, financial services, housing, information & content is pushed at us with bias and partiality, all because without us knowing we are being watched, measured and judged by AI algorithms that not even the people that created them fully understand. Governments have used AI and data in ways that undermine civil liberties but they are being called out, they are accountable, although there remains an understandable concern that an extreme left or right wing government might not be so shy in abusing the power of AI & data. As they say, just because you are paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

So, solutions. I’ll start with the two proposals I’ve made previously because I still believe they are 100% right and both doable.

Firstly, social media needs to be regulated and forced to move to a subscription model. Social media generates a huge amount of data due its pervasiveness and frequency of use. AI learns from data and Social Media is where it does most of its homework. These are powerful platforms and they should require licenses that can be revoked in the case of malfeasance, just like newspapers and TV were. If the business model is subscription based they can still be very large businesses but most importantly the algorithms would be trained to build customer loyalty not eyeball addiction. If you pay something every month to use facebook, even just $1 then you are a customer not data fodder.

Secondly, there should be government investment together with commercial incentives to develop platforms that allow people to own, control and, when they chose to, transact their own data. Data is the new oil but it has been allowed to fall into the hands of robber barons. It is your data, you should be able to harvest it, store it and use it however benefits you most. This is not a quick fix and will require secure technology infrastructure with the scale and complexity we see today in financial markets and services. In my view it could be an opportunity for the financial sector who have the resources and customer base to make this work. Even if you don’t like your bank you have to trust them because they manage your most sensitive information already. A bank could be trusted to store your personal data, allow it to be transacted on your terms to get you a return and to manage those transactions. I don’t understand why banks don’t look at data in the same way they used to look at cash – bring it to us, we’ll keep it safe and give you access to it when you want and if you’ll allow us we will lend it out to be people (encrypted to preserve privacy) and make it work for you. Instead of going to facebook, or any of the data trawlers, scrapers and scavengers, big brands would go to the banks and buy the profiles they are looking for to promote whatever they want. People would consent to see brand content, anonymously, if it was made worth their time or interest.

Put these two things together – social media on subscription and the mechanism to leverage one’s own data – and you have solved a big part of the problem with no need for regulation.

That said there is still a role for regulation to prevent data abuse at the hands of AI and hold miscreants accountable but it has to be co-ordinated internationally and that sems like quite the challenge in a world were there seems to be growing nationalism and weakening global alliances. That was my conclusion but something in ‘Coded Bias’ gave me some optimism. The point was made that algorithms need an equivalent to the FDA, the US federal agency for Food and Drug Administration. We don’t allow people to market pharmaceuticals or foods that have not been tested or lack the appropriate quality controls. And this does, more or less, work across international borders. So why can’t there be an IAA, International Algorithm Administration, backed by international law that enforces the responsible development of AI?

Finally, I want to address the issue of whether big tech companies are actually able to behave responsibly – they say they want to but always use the defense that the scale of their operation, the sheer number of users and data points, make it impossible to have foresight on all unintended consequences and oversight on every malpractice. Let’s focus on the issue raised in ‘Coded Bias’, that facial recognition technology is biased against certain social groups, generally the disadvantaged groups who are under-represented in the data the AI is learning from. In my research I came across something new to me (I never claimed to be a technology expert). It is called synthetic data and is predicted to become a huge industry. The models and processing needed to develop synthetic data are no doubt very complex but the output is very simple to explain, the clue is in the name. This is artificial data, data that’s confected, invented, made up. It is needed to fill gaps in real authentic data to help AI to learn to do whatever it is developed to do. For AI to be effective it needs lots of data and the data has to be comprehensive and statistically representative. So they run lots of simulations based on lots of different scenarios in order to produce data to plug the gaps in real data.

This is a terrifying concept but it is not conceptual, it is happening right now. Many if not most of the systems developed using machine learning and AI use synthetic data, it overcomes issues of sensitive and confidential data that is hard to get. Obviously it is open to abuse, you can create the data to feed to AI that teaches it to discriminate prejudicially. So per the previous point, there has to be regulation. However, it can also be used to eliminate bias.

As humans we are programmed to be biased, our brains work by using pattern recognition. We know not all snakes are dangerous but some are, so if it looks like a snake we run. It’s a basic survival instinct and instincts are very hard to shift. When we look at an individual we take in the visual cues and form judgements and, just like the malgorithms, our brains have been trained to make prejudicial assumptions on flawed information. Someone looks a particular way, talks a particular way, exhibits certain behaviours and we make a negative judgement, there is no point in pretending otherwise. That judgement can be unfair but as humans we have the ability to over-ride our unconscious bias and make a conscious decision to look deeper, to give someone a chance, before making a decision that affects them. Synthetic data allows us to programme that humanity into AI. Poor people are a bad credit risk, the real data will teach AI this lesson and make it hard for certain social groups to access the loans that might help lift them out of poverty. The same system will make it very easy for the well off to buy a second car. One thinks it would be better for society to make finance available to facilitate social mobility rather than more physical mobility for the well off. If so we can use synthetic data to upweight the scenarios in which poor people are not unfairly treated as bad credit risks.

‘Coded Bias’ certainly got me thinking, so well done Netflix, again. My brain works in strange ways and the focus on racial bias in facial recognition made me think about ears. A lot of images of people will be side on as they walk past the camera that’s recording them, so it will only detect one ear. The AI might conclude that lots of people, even most people in certain locations, might only have one ear. Having only one ear has a medical term, it’s called microtia and it is more common than I thought when I looked it up. It occurs in 1-5 out of every 10,000 births which I think means there are 4 million out of the global population of 8 billion that only have one ear. Not common then, but not unheard of in the real world. We could teach AI about this, using synthetic data because samples of real world data would not likely detect the prevalence of microtia. It might prevent AI drawing the wrong conclusions, either ignoring microtia or over-estimating it. On the other hand, it might help facial recognition spot a one eared crook like Mark ‘Chopper’ Reid, the Australian criminal who cut off his own ear in prison to get an early release (it’s a long story). My question is very simple – would a machine have even thought about this, would it have looked up the data on microtia, searched online for an example of a one eared crook? I doubt it. So, if you have them, listen with both ears and both eyes wide open, we need to use AI, not let AI use us.

Teaser: D-Marketing is coming

I have finished the first draft of my latest book. It needs more work but here is a teaser.

In every corner of the globe concerns over climate change, pollution, resource depletion and environmental degradation are now taken very seriously especially, but not exclusively, among the younger generation. Governments and the business world have had to respond to this and for the most part they have. We have green energy policies, more responsible and sustainable sourcing, production and distribution, recycling infrastructure, to highlight just a few aspects of sustainability. Maybe not as much as we need to meet the climate change targets but a lot more than we had and moving in the right direction. Sustainability is mainstream in almost everyone’s thinking almost all of the time. But we are missing something, quite a big thing – excessive demand. We are buying and consuming too much, not everywhere, not among the ‘other 3 billion’ who live in abject poverty, but in the developed world we buy too much stuff. We are, as part of the drive towards sustainability, aware of waste as an issue but we have not tackled the root cause of this – marketing.

$1 trillion a year gets spent on persuading us not just to buy but to buy more than we need and this causes enormous waste both physical and obvious and hidden, ignored. We have not tackled the demand-side wastage and marketing’s role in that, so we are fighting the climate change and environmental battle with one arm tied behind our back. This book tries to lift the lid on that and offer an alternative, Deliberate Marketing – a more responsible approach that addresses marketing generated wastage but not necessarily by reducing profits and enterprise value. Because we also waste a lot of money on unnecessary marketing so we can cut that out too.

My argument in a nutshell are as follows:-

  • Rooted in free-market economics, the purpose of marketing is to sell more, more, more. This produces vast amounts of excess consumption and waste. Some waste can be recycled but that takes 50% of the resources it took to produce in the first place. Less unnecessary purchases = less recycling.
  • Sustainability does not focus enough on the demand side.
  • It is possible to reduce excess, irresponsible demand and the waste it produces without necessarily reducing profits or enterprise value.
  • We are not looking to impose austerity and fight human nature or progress. Just 5-10% reduction would be game-changing and reducing wasted marketing can more than offset the commercial risk of doing so.
  • We need a better more deliberate and connected way of doing marketing and a better way to measure and account for all costs.
  • There are strategies to reduce waste and safeguard commercial success. There is a simple process a business could follow but it needs to be holistic, looking at the whole business model.

Deliberate Marketing – think of it as marketing that makes you proud, socially and professionally.

The book offers a point of view on how to reduce wasted marketing and reduce marketing generated waste. It highlights areas to focus on to achieve this and suggest a process for D-Marketing. The objective is to generate interest, to start the conversation and pose some challenging questions. It is not offering ‘an answer’ or ‘a blue-print’, that’s impossible without looking at a specific business in a specific category. But here’s an interesting thing about waste, once aware of it, a well-intentioned person or leadership team finds it hard to ignore. There is no study to back this up, merely a lot of circumstantial evidence, but the majority of waste is probably down to thoughtlessness, a feeling of powerlessness and/or an assumption that it’s someone else’s responsibility. As a species we are sentient and most of us have a conscience. If we are aware of waste, if we think we can do something about it and it is our responsibility to do so, we will. At the very least we will try.

The audience for this book is business in general, and marketers in particular. Its purpose is to make people think about waste and believe there is perhaps something they can do if they try.

Case Study: The challenge of Demarketing

I’ve taken my idea of Demarketing from my eBook “So What’s wrong with Marketing” and turned it into a case study for Business Students. Even if people reject the premise that we need Demarketing I think the exercise of thinking it through will enrich one’s view of marketing in a sustainable world. Anyone interested in using it let me know.

The Demarketing Challenge

Background

In my eBook “So what’s wrong with Marketing” I put forward the idea of ‘Demarketing’, the re-purposing of marketing to reduce consumption.

“Marketing was developed for a world of economic growth. Its purpose, however you dress it up, was (still is) to make people ‘consume’ more. That’s why marketers refer to people as ‘consumers’. The problem, it would appear, is that we can’t just keep on consuming, wasting and depleting resources at the expense of our planet. There is no ‘Planet B’. So that presents something of a difficulty for marketing in the future – can it, should it, survive in a world where we need to persuade people not to buy what they don’t need or can’t recycle? Instead of marketing, should we not think about ‘demarketing’?”

Summarised like this demarketing makes absolute sense. We cannot just continue to invest $ trillions to persuade people to buy more stuff than they need and more than we can cost-effectively recycle or, in whatever way, re-engineer to be sustainable. And yet governments around the world (of varying political persuasion) for what they would say are sound economic models continue to strive for GDP growth to lift people out of poverty and improve the quality of life. Can the idea of buying less co-exist with the imperative to increase economic output? At a micro level can a company’s board of directors persuade their shareholders to support them if they wish to invest in suppressing demand? Investors move their money to wherever gives them the highest returns. Perhaps it might work if all companies faced legislation that required them to fully cost their products to take account of all their environmental and societal impact (no business currently directly bears the cost of the full life-cycle and total impact of their products or services on e.g. waste disposal, health, infrastructure, they just pay tax in a largely one-size-fits-all fiscal system and many avoid even doing that if they can). But it would be hard for a government to be re-elected on a manifesto that includes proposed legislation limiting what people can buy and raising prices. Demarketing might sound like the right thing to do, but how to do it is the challenge.

Nonetheless there are signs of positive movement albeit more in the name of CSR and sustainability rather than specifically this idea of actively demarketing. Blackrock, the behemoth of private equity, now insist all its investment portfolio have coherent CSR and sustainability programmes. There are a growing number of ethical funds like FirstPlanet, dedicated to investing in businesses that can deliver financial returns and build a better world. More and more big businesses like Ikea, Unilever, even Amazon have moved CSR and sustainability from something they should do ‘as well’ to being central to their core purpose. All for the good, but there aren’t many like Patagonia who spend money on ads asking people not buy their products unless they really need them and who offer free repairs to make previous purchases last longer (they will even repair competitive brands if you ask nicely).

Demarketing is a tough idea to get your mind around and some would argue is not needed. Oxford were early champions of the Circular Economy and this has now taken root in many top academic institutions. The industrial revolution (and the later technology revolutions) were based on a linear economic model – find/process materials, turn them into products or services, get people to buy them, use them and then throw them away to buy something new using the money you earn to help find/process materials, turn them into products or services, get people to buy them, use them and then throw them away to buy something new. While it was mostly Europe and America doing this we could cope with the energy demands and the waste. But with America and Europe, bar the odd recession, relentlessly consuming more and China, India, the rest of Asia catching up and set to overtake them, plus South America (maybe even Africa one day) following suit this linear economic model has become unsustainable, an existential threat.  It’s obvious, we need to make a linear model circular through recycling and repurposing. If we focus on this perhaps we can go on just consuming more and more and more. On the other hand, maybe events will overtake us……..

There’s a linearity to the environmental debate too – more people, more consumption, more carbon, more climate change. A great deal of the spotlight is focused on climate change and greenhouse gases. Let’s not argue the science, let’s just go with the consensus, the wisdom of a wise crowd, and accept that we need to limit global warming to no more than 1.5 c-degrees in the next two decades and thereafter reverse it. There are 3 ways to do that – reduce, replace and remove CO2. In this linearity there is no argument against reducing the consumption of carbon fuels, many argue it is the priority. Renewable energy sources may not come on stream (cost-effectively) fast enough, electric cars just push the issue further up the supply chain. There is investment into technology to remove CO2 but nowhere near as much as has gone into alternative energy perhaps because it’s hard to design anything better at removing C02 than trees. But no-one seems to be confident that we can plant enough trees fast enough to compensate for the rise in CO2 emissions, or indeed enough to replace the ones we are cutting down in places like the Amazon. A lot of businesses like Ikea have tree planting initiatives to offset their environmental impact but in the wider context it’s really just a sticking plaster. No, we have to reduce consumption, no argument. Well there is an alternative to this, or at least a different point of attack. We could reduce population growth, like China tried to do (for different reasons), but outside a totalitarian state that would be hard. Or we could reduce consumption of things we don’t need to consume and/or replace consumption with better alternatives, like reducing meat and dairy for plant based foods. Or we could try a combination of all of this?

My argument is – and I hope I’m wrong – reducing wasteful, unnecessary consumption of everything, not just carbon fuels, needs to be in the mix because the alternatives won’t kick in fast enough. There needs to be more Patagonia thinking, we need to stop spending money making the environmental challenge worse, and embrace the challenging idea of demarketing, perhaps not everywhere and not to the same degree for every category, but we need to think about using some new form of marketing to do the opposite of what we have been trained to do, to make people buy less not more.

To take just one example, and apologies to Gillette for singling them out, they forced people to throw away a razor they were perfectly happy with to buy a new razor with more blades (and some little ‘easy-glide’ strip). There are many other things people have been persuaded to throw away in order to buy things they did not really need but that is a choice people can make. Gillette gave us no choice, they took the replacement blades for our razor off the market and their marketing team invested millions of dollars to force us to buy a new razor needing a new type of blade not all of us wanted or needed. Surely that kind of marketing is just plain irresponsible? We are being told to avoid travel where we can for the sake of the environment. With just a little demarketing to reduce unnecessary consumption and wastage we could happily enjoy more guilt-free travel.

Can it be done? Can we square the circle between demarketing and government-led economic growth, between responsible consumption and shareholder returns? Honestly, no-one knows but it might be possible, if only to an extent sufficient to make an impact. It deserves the effort to try, if only as an insurance policy in the event of the other planet-saving initiatives failing to deliver in time. And it can be as creatively and intellectually satisfying as conventional marketing, perhaps more so. Selling more Gillette razors, or beer, or cosmetics, or fashion clothing or washing powder or burgers or biscuits or electronics etc etc is not actually that hard once you know the rules and tactics. Demarketing will be very hard and demanding of the best ‘marketing’ minds.

Exercise

Select a B2C company you are familiar with, preferably one with a reputation for high marketing investment.

You are to prepare a presentation for the board to persuade them to embrace and commit resources to a demarketing strategy. You don’t have to develop the strategy, you just have to persuade them of 3 things:-

  • There is a case for demarketing (building on the macro rationale make it specific to this business and category)
  • It can enhance enterprise value and shareholder returns in the long term
  • You have some feasible ideas for options to explore

Success would mean they would agree to set up a task force to explore your ideas.

Some starter thoughts

  • There is evidence that businesses that have really committed to sustainability have out-performed their peer group. Demarketing takes sustainability to the next level.
  • Enterprise value and shareholder returns are derived from a sustainable profit stream. The same or lower sales does not have to mean lower profits – you can grow share, or raise margins
  • Strong brands can have a much higher valuation even if they have lower sales cf Tesla versus Ford
  • Demarketing could result in far more efficient marketing spend “Advertising is the tax you pay for having an unremarkable product”
  • “What gets measured gets done” – a business committed to demarketing would choose to create better KPI’s that show the link to future returns. Engagement, loyalty, affinity are all believed to correlate to brand strength and from that to enterprise value and shareholder returns
  • Case studies can help your case – Patagonia is the one everyone cites, is this relevant to your business, what others can you find?
  • It is hard to imagine what demarketing looks like, some examples of what it could be in terms of customer communications, engagement, events, service etc might help. In what way does ‘good demarketing’ differ from “good marketing” in terms of skills, people, partners, spend?
  • It would also help to show how this links to, and builds on, other sustainability/CSR initiatives
  • Are there business model changes that could help make demarketing attractive e.g. direct to customer?
  • Break the challenge down ito market segmentation. Who/when/where is the opportunity? Reducing consumption can relate to purchase frequency, penetration, usage.

Mark Sherrington

mark.sherrington@marksherrington.com

Solving the Social Dilemma

I’ve just finished my article on my response to the Netflix documentary, ‘The Social Dilemma’. I ran a small survey to help me in the writing of this and results are still coming in so there may be some further additions and editing to be done but I wanted to get this first version out there and see what people think. Please let me know.

Solving the Social Dilemma

The recent release of Jeff Orlowski’s documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’ on Netflix may prove to be an even bigger deal than their 2016 film ‘The Great Hack’. The latter left you feeling that the villains of the piece were the businesses like Cambridge Analytica who malevolently manipulated social media data to change the political narrative, influence elections and threaten democracy. TSD points the finger squarely at big tech who purposefully design social media to feed their commercial model and in the process fuck up society and the whole of mankind.

 “If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product”.

Social media is not just abusing their tech to sell us stuff, they are selling us – our attention and our behaviour – without us knowing and to our detriment. TSD paints a scary future with overtones of the human batteries in The Matrix and Skynet from Terminator – AI may have started as a technology tool we used but it might become us that are the tools serving the needs of higher artificial intelligence. You think this is fantasy? Watch the documentary.

“Only two industries call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and IT” said Yale’s Edward Tufte.

Marketers (who pay for all this with their ad budgets) are trying to wean themselves off calling customers ‘consumers’. (If you drop the ‘m’ consumer is an anagram for ‘con user’). I think ‘people’ would be the best word because it simultaneously captures diversity and common humanity – the ‘we’. But I don’t think the lexicon is the issue and in fact I don’t think marketers or even the titans of big tech are the villains. They are people. A lot of the contributors to TSD, people like Tristan Harris or Justin Rosenstein, are from big tech. They have a conscience and know that many of their former colleagues do too. Marketers are not evil svengalis. They are paid to promote their products but most recognize that this increasingly means doing so in a sustainable and socially responsible way because that is what society wants. It is what will make their customers happy and they like happy customers. So what makes good people in marketing and tech do bad stuff? Two things:-

  1. Not recognizing the unintended consequences
  2. Not having a commercially attractive alternative

On the heels of ‘The Great Hack’, TSD can address the former. As ‘Inconvenient Truth’ was for climate change, this is a tipping point in the debate about social media and the issues around the misuse of the data it generates for the ‘attention extraction’ industry. We all know that something is wrong, we all know this is seriously fucked up and heading in a bad direction – but what is the alternative? What is the antidote? TSD is incredibly powerful and disturbing, very disturbing especially as it leaves you in no doubt things need to change but not much hope they will and no real solutions other than regulation (of some sort not defined) to disrupt the business model on which big tech has thrived.

Just as I concluded in my paper ‘Naked Economics; the new laws of the jungle’ the easy conclusion is that governments need to fix this – ‘they’ need to regulate. Easy but wrong because even if ‘they’ wanted to, ‘they’ can’t. It’s too complex, there is too much vested interest and there is no ‘they’. The legislation would need to be intricately drafted to cover every issue and avoid every unintended consequence. There are $ trillions at stake so expect some resistance and every government would need to act in lock step which they won’t/can’t.

So, as with the new economics, let’s focus on ‘we’ –  what we the people can do about the social dilemma that is social media data harvesting, processing and commercial application. For the wider economic context the macro levers to pull were the attribution of cost and ascribing of value to enable us to make better choices. In the specific area of data the micro levers are platforms that allow us as individuals to own, control and transact our own data.

The solution lies not so much in regulating the current business model, although that might have a role to play, but rather in creating a new business model that empowers people.

At the heart of the current model is data about 3 things:-

  • What you think
  • What you do
  • The connection between these

The tech, the algorithms, the UI and the AI that are all designed to do this can of course then be applied to change what you think and do, to get your attention and to persuade you. The business model is then to monetize this by selling it to people who wish to promote their business. It can also be sold to people wishing to change your politics but that will only ever be a small fraction of the billions social media earns. The big bucks come from big business.

The global industry for advertising and research is roughly $1 Trillion. That is how much business will pay to find out what you think and present the best version of themselves to you at the most opportune time.

What if we just told them? What if we offered the information they want to know and stuck our hand up when they had the best chance to sell something to us? Because if we did, en masse, then the revenues for facebook et al would start to evaporate.

Who would be prepared to do that? We all would. We do it all the time for purchases that are important to us and about which we are unsure. Say we want a haircut, a new car, expensive cosmetics, a new home, a piece of home electronics, a suit for our wedding. We pitch up, tell someone we are interested and then proceed to tell them everything they need to know about our lives, quite often more than they need to know. Yes we may do some research on-line and then purchase on-line but there are still many things where we meet people face to face, people that we know are there to sell us stuff, we tell them we are interested and we answer pretty much any question they care to ask. Why? Because it is in our interest to do so and we get something in return – help in making our best choice.

As long as we feel in control of the exchange of our information, our attention, our data, and this has material benefit to us we are happy to give business what they want.

I have been thinking about this for the last 5 years and I have ideas for two potential tech based platforms that would allow people at scale to exchange their ideas and their data – on their terms – with businesses and brands. These could divert a big chunk of the revenue Social Media generates directly into the hands of us, we the people, and offer what business wants quicker, cheaper and more effectively.

It would not stop the potential of big tech to produce addictive, manipulative social  platforms with the power to affect peoples’ physical and mental health, to undermine truth with fake news, to divide society and swing elections but it would take away their incentive to do so. They would eventually be left with only one option which is to make you pay for their service – and if we pay for it then we control it. It becomes the product, not us.

Let me know if anyone is interested to know more……..