History
Elon musk, controlling important parts of social media, ie. Twitter, and all the data that is assembled through Tesla. They actually make a lot of their value through data gathering. Also the role Musk tried to play in the government. Comes with the ongoing question of how to regulate big-tech in Europe. Almost none of these big internet companies are European. They are all American (except maybe Spotify which is a kind . Ie. Between US and Europe there is a kind of rivalry about the domination of social media. There are also chinese equivalents, like tiktok which also dominate the market.
Can Europe afford to decide not to have American AI? Is this economically viable? It seems Europe cannot stand on its own legs in terms of its own development of AI, rather needing American or Chinese versions of it. This kind of development of capital just does not exist for this matter.
There is the issue of the free media: can there be a public sphere in which arguments can be exchanged freely, so that better arguments can win? This idea was never perfect, but doesn’t it seem that this idea is particularly threatened? Is free speech something we want when disinformation can be made prevalent in such a way? Are the European law-institutions sufficient to deal with this – or are democracies structurally naive in treating every argument as if it were viable, it seems to lead to a discourse that is structurally flawed.
Data as a new raw resource. What data is public and which is private, and the fight over who has control over the cloud? The cloud isn’t actually a cloud of course but data centers, which can disappear in a fire or any other kind of disaster. Cloud is a misleading term, because the data is stored somewhere.
It’s logical that capitalism will begin reaching into people’s lives, given that it tries to conquer further markets at any given moment. It is not really unexpected that capitalism develops to a point of trading individual aspects of our persons.
There is the classic fordist modernity, relating to mass production. People are standardised into the same, you upscale one product in order to sell it to as many as possible. Then there is the second modernity of the 70s, when people become more critical, we talk about bottom-up movements, and Zuboff argues that the third modernity includes both aspects. She describes that, as the internet comes into place, it isn’t at all a democratic process, but seems entirely reliant on the weird legalisation of documents and signing of documents.
When the internet became a thing in the 90s, there was the promise of increased freedom on the internet. The idea was a kind of emancipatory promise, we can have democracy in ways not previously possible. All information will become available. You no longer need to purchase as much knowledge in the form of books, you are not excluded and hampered in ways that existed before. It served to connect people who for democracy who before could not participate in the same way.
It was not initially clear that the internet would be organised according to certain private organisations.
The internet was developed under certain circumstances, which were probably contingent on certain decisions, such as those of Steve Jobs, and the laissez-faire approach of states towards the internet. There seems to have been both structural reasons and decisions which could have been made in other ways.
Zuboff explains that the internet emerges in the late 80s, early 90s, but that is the moment where neoliberalism had existed for about 10-15 years – ie. Private companies were dominating a large part of society. However, there were still a lot of things which were not entirely privatised yet, eg. GSMs in Belgium were rented. Then we see the general continuation of seeing airlines, etc. privatised.
When these different streams come together we see the ’apple modernity’ which brings in the individual, but under specific circumstances.
Up until the 80s, telecommunications where state-owned, and after this privatisation would slowly be the case.
Because there is a clear tension between the amount of information companies have about us, and we have about them, there is a clear power dynamic at play here. But, because a lot of site-usage is free, there is generally the idea that we pay using our data. However, in the EU at least, we ’kind of’ have the right to be forgotten. Though this is a very clumsy process which is almost impossible to push through.
Things are not just invented and things happen. Rather there is a general technology studies which researches the invention of things which do not take off, and why those things can exist, ie. The material conditions of why things become used and not, there needs to be proper reasons for things like this to exist. It is not that things are just invented and then remain.
1934 Television: Nazi olympics televised, with quite few people actually watching
1957 Sony TR-63 Radio: life changing for people in the 50s and 60s, making the concept of the youth a concurrent concept in society.
1978 Sony Walkman: similar as before.
1981 IBM personal computer: Slowly started to become something people were able to afford and bring home.
1984 Macintosh: Easier to use with a graphic interface.
1990 World Wide Web: the ability to connect computers. Some countries had a similar system, like in France, which was a national intraweb. The information at this time was available in an odd hierarchical structure.
1997 Google Search Engine: the rise of a search engine which was able to maintain user-friendliness and use.
2001 Apple Ipod: a walkman but not with a cassette, but rather something that could store digitised music in MP3s and similar file-formats. You could get music out of the CD-rom in a ’legal’ way.
2007 Apple Iphone: One of the initial successful smartphones.
2016 GDPR act of the EU.
Technological change.
Century of the car (20th century), with an entire environment built for the use of cars, moved itself into the century of the smartphone (21st century), which in a similar way starts to built its infrastructure around the phone. For us, life is centered on the smartphone, everything is somehow connected to it. It is more intrusive than the car almost, as the entire economy is usually built on it. Many companies and social institutions would not be able to continue to exist without the smartphone.
Each time that something is invented, the question about ’what do we do with it’ arises. Should it be owned by the state or should it be regulated by the state or what?? The EU as an economic space tries very much to regulate these new technologies in different ways.
But what technologies are we actually speaking of? Are all these media technologies a stream of the same? Do they relate to each other elsehow?
Very rarely, almost never, do we see a full substitution of one media technology with another. There used to be radio, and then the television came. However, the radio is of course not gone after that, it still serves its uses, for example in cars. In the initial industrialisation you have massmedia, in the sense of newspapers, which appear multiple times a day and cover the daily news incredibly quickly. There was enormous competition fought over by different tycoons. Newspapers haven’t disappeared either though! They are still seen as legitimate method of receiving information back then.
Around 1900 there were about 100 different newspapers, now there are probably only about 20.
In flanders, television in the 60s was very important for the local national consciousness.
Television and radio reach out, but always have a private dimension because one increasingly comes to listen to it on one’s own.
In 1955: only 1 in 7 households in West Europe owned a TV
By 1965: 90%
Radio and TV amplified the national factor. Is a kind of national technology, there is a difference between german and french tv-colouring, and did in fact not serve to bring people together. Rather it served to strengthed national ties. Initially in Flanders, people had to watch Dutch TV, which greately shaped the way they thought of themselves.
Influence of state on public TV ramained strong until 80s. Ie. It is in public hands and seen as a kind of entertaining education, it should be cultural and it has a kind of mission.
Decline of cinema. Newspapers and radio less affected by rise of TV. Initially it was thought that radio would disappear, but instead it moved into the car or in the kitchen but rarely in the living room, ie. The place of television. Newspapers kept a certain role for political discourse. Cinema suffered strongly, recovered slightly in the 90s, but in most countries the industry died or was intensely hurt.
Privatisation of TV in the 80s with Berlusconi and Murdoch. It is initially pushed through with Thatcher with the idea that the market is the solution. Murdoch is an australian media tycoon, who built an empire, but also changing the media-landscape with things like fox-news. A strange thing is that next to state-television, you can now have access to an endless amount of television stations. ie.
new forms of TV, but also more uniformity in TV-culture. State-television has to compete with private television and as such begins to be more similar to it.
TV and Coldwar: what effect did it have? In certain areas of Eastern Europe, you could get access to western television by pointing their antenna. Was this a major factor in bringing down communism as Germans could easily see what the West was like.
The streaming revolution and the current end of classic television: people can watch things at their leisure, rather than having to watch things when it airs on TV.
Berlusconi made his own media company as well. He then became president and bought prostitutes. Italian politics almost broke down in the early 90s, at which point he went into politics himself as the Forza Italia. The name is a footballcry. He is a kind of trump avant la lettre. He mainly works with newspapers, television and radio, which he turned into political influence. Was prime-minister 3 times.
Football plays an important role in Murdoch’s empire as well. Before Murdoch, people thought that if you started televising football they will no longer go. However, he started televising football with a fee, which was very successful.
Transistorisation in 50s and 60s became important in a kind of triangle: there was affluence (money one could spend not on surviving), before transistor radio, you had to stay at home and listen with your parents. The transistor allows you to go outside and listen to music. They importantly play music that the main channels do not. So it is based on affluence, music specifically for young generations, and this building into a generational identity. There is a clear idea that their experiences in terms of music consumption, fashion and life-style is distinct from the earlier generation. This of course has to come together with other developments, but whatever.
This is repeated with the rise of MTV. And kind of exemplified in the video killed the radio star. Cassette tape together with a walkman became important for the continuation of this, however, it allows you to listen on your own. The cassette tape allows you to record on your own whatever is played on the radio.
Then music is digitised on Cds, ipods, and later iphone, letting music be easily available. Spotify and youtube making it further available.
Progress can lead to certain counter-movements. If people listen to vinyls or other older kinds of media, it is a kind idealisation of slowing down. Last year was the first year since the 80s that more vinyl was sold than Cds. Human beings have other than technical considerations.
Music is constantly reflecting on what is going in the sphere of medias. One of the first videos of MTV was as such about the death of Radio, despite this not being the case.
With the rise of social media, we saw platforms organised by corporations which benefitted off of user-generated content (facebook, youtube). This becomes the heavily commercialised internet, where a large part of revenues are made. Large parts of commerce start through things like amazon. Should then the EU come in and regulate these sorts of platform. Single states would have a very hard time competing with these companies. You could theoretically say that Google is illegal in Belgium, but that would also mean that all the Belgians would no longer have access to all of Google’s data-collection. If it is to be done it needs to be done on the European level.
There is then the rise with things like GDPR which becomes an example of how things could be done, despite companies often trying to circumwent the rules.
Should the data of European citizens be protected, and US companies be able to do with it what they see fit?
All the discourse we have, is organised through the platforms, and as such we should have a local say in how that is organised. If you spread false information, insult someone, etc. there should be regulations in place which hinder this. This is where the idea of core-platforms come in. You can access the internet without google, but it is increasingly difficult. If you fulfill the criteria that the core-platform services poses, they should also be regulated. It is dangerous when google is the gateway to the internet.
Another way of regulating is the classic monopoly. If you built a monopoly on eg. cars, the EU would intervene, same thing for smartphones. The EU should intervene if there is no access to knowledge about the kind of alternatives we have for our smartphones about what search engine we use.
The EU is the only region in the world where there has been a scale to the protection of their individuals. Not always successfully, though partially at least.
Internet as attention economy:
Attention has become a scare main resource in 21st century which forces economies to be essentially built around attention. Economics is always about scarce resources, about things that must be divided among certain things. What people want then, as such, is your attention. What does this imply?
If we want to understand populism, here might be a fruitful analysis. Who is setting the agenda for this to become possible?
Memes become prevalent as a kind of condensed communication which allow for information to be spread within this kind of short term attention.
Where does disinformation come from? Who aggravates it? Well… a let me just say… hehe.
Is AI aggravating these already existing tensions and problems of regulation? Is it wise to regulate it at all? Can we regulate something that we may not understand? (Yes).
In the US, it is understood that AI should be based in there, and no where else. AI needs to win against any other kind of AI. It will likely also serve a military role, drones being driven by AI, rather than people.
The rise of the digital elite, and is there a rise of a new feudalism?
It is questioned whether feudalism ever existed today. However, the argument goes that there is this kind of economical elite who have access to so much more than previously makes it seem like there is a kind of elite not in the sense of the bourgoisie, but rather an almost royal elite. However it seems very different than an aristrocracy by birth. Almost all the powerful positions in silicon valley are occupied by men, often accompanied by very specific ideas about gender roles.
Is Mark Zuckerberg like a roman style imperial politician?
Pay pal mafia. Founders of pay pal became very influential in other silicon valley companies.
Tech-oligarchy: It has a direct entanglement with politics, but what kind?
Structural authoritarian character of ’big tech’? Which kind of oligarchy are we talking about? Do they have a genuinely ruling role or are they supportive? And what social vision do they carry? Did they surrender to Trump or did Trump surrender to them?
Magnificient seven: Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Nvidia, Tesla, Apple; all US-based.