If You Build a Better Internet, Will They Come?

 

It's been quite a while since most thinking people agreed that there is something wrong with the way the Internet affects public and private life.  In the April issue of National Review, policy analyst Luke Hogg takes a hard look at one reason for these problems:  the effects of centralization.

 

He begins by harking back to the early hobbyist-style years of the Internet in the 1990s.  It was a time of relative freedom in the sense that users could control who they associated with and how much and what kind of information they shared.  Many online users were seeking the ideal proclaimed by an early statement of that era which Hogg quotes from the operators of YouTube:  "anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world."

 

A lot of bits have passed through the Internet since then, and users' current trust in social media isn't much greater than their trust in legacy media:  less than one out of five people recently polled say they trust social media to provide accurate information.  One big perceived problem is censorship, and while many states have passed laws prohibiting social-media platforms from viewpoint censoring, the U. S. Supreme Court has ruled that such laws are likely to be unconstitutional, as they restrict a private entity's freedom of speech, or freedom to refrain from speech. 

 

And this is not just a U. S. problem.  Hogg cites the case of how Facebook inadvertently helped the military in Myanmar to incite violence against that country's Rohinga minority group.  It turned out that the Facebook monitors simply couldn't understand what was going on among the specific cultural groups involved.

 

Hogg sees these and other problems rooted in one factor:  centralization.  And he sees two solutions, both technological:  to give users greater control over their experiences on a given platform, and also to enable them to communicate as they wish across multiple platforms.

 

Right now, such customization is nearly impossible.  If you get tired of what's going on in your Facebook feed, you can up and quit, as millions of people have done from time to time.  But just quitting a platform deprives you of all the good your social network might have been doing, as well as allowing you to avoid the idiots who made you want to quit in the first place.

 

Hogg talks about "middleware," which is a name for software that works as a kind of concierge or secretary between the centralized mega-platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, and the individual user.  With the proper protocols in place, such middleware could defend children against pornography and stalking no matter which platform it came from, for instance. 

 

There have been experiments in this direction, but they have either been new built-from-the-ground-up platforms, or specialized software that interfaces between the user and existing platforms.  So far, they haven't made much of a dent in the problem, but they show that the technology is out there, waiting to be used.

 

Hogg says that some existing regulations would have to be changed in order for decentralization to progress meaningfully.  In particular, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act have had unexpected side effects that allow current platforms to suppress both competing content they don't like, and also stifle the kind of middleware that would allow decentralization.  These laws could be amended to fix these problems.  And Hogg also calls on the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to encourage decentralization with a stick as well as a carrot.  Obviously, if things are going to change in a big way, the regulatory environment will have to change too.

 

My heart is with Hogg's ideas, but my head and my wallet see a big problem that Hogg seems to avoid:  how platforms will make money from a decentralized Internet. 

 

Allow me to be nerdy for a moment by quoting something called Metcalfe's Law, which, according to Wikipedia, "states that the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system."  So if a given network goes from 50 users to 1000, it's not twenty times as valuable, but twenty-squared, or four hundred times as valuable.  While I may be taking this law a little beyond its original purview, it's the main reason that businesses whose essential function is to connect people and profit from their connections have a huge incentive to grow and take over absorb smaller networks.  It happened with Western Union, it happened with Ma Bell, and it happened with Facebook and YouTube. 

 

Much of what Hogg proposes to do to decentralize the Internet would directly threaten the network dominance of prominent social-media platforms.  If Facebook can't guarantee control over what their users see and do, including ads, then they won't be able to sell ads as easily, and their whole economic model is threatened.  If users are the product, they can't be allowed to just interconnect promiscuously and wander around and select exactly what experiences they want. 

 

In the face of this problem, I see one tiny little light that might be at the end of the tunnel.  Many of you may be familiar with a social-media platform called Nextdoor.  It runs Neighborhood Network, which Wikipedia calls a "hyperlocal" social networking service.  Compared to Meta, the $164-billion-revenue elephant that runs Facebook, Nextdoor is a $200-million mouse.  But speaking for myself, I have fallen into at least reading Nextdoor posts and occasionally finding useful information on them, mainly because they are literally from people next door, or at least in my immediate geographic area.  And I have nothing voluntarily to do with Facebook.  Yes, there are idiots on Nextdoor too, but there are also people I stand a good chance of actually seeing in the grocery store and getting to know better.  That virtually never happens on Facebook or the other centralized platforms.

 

Maybe some giant revolt will happen, and everybody will boycott the big boys in preference to decentralized social-media operations such as Nextdoor.  I agree with Hogg that decentralization would be great if we could get it to happen.  But the only way I can see it happening is if users insist on it, and keep insisting till it does.

 

Sources:  Luke Hogg's article "Building a Better Internet" appeared on pp. 24-26 of the April 2025 edition of National Review.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Metcalfe's Law, Nextdoor, and Meta. 

Free Speech In the Age of Government-Influenced Facebook

 

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, chairman, and CEO of MetaPlatforms, which includes Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, recently sent a letter to Jim Jordan, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.  Zuckerberg is a busy man, and this was no bread-and-butter socializing note, but more along the lines of a confession. 

 

In the note, Zuckerberg admitted that in 2021, Facebook had caved in to government pressure, specifically from the Biden White House, concerning certain posts relating to COVID-19, "including humor and satire."  The company was also guilty of "demoting" stories about Hunter Biden's laptop when it chose to believe the FBI's claim that it was Russian disinformation in 2020.  In both cases, Zuckerberg says basically we were wrong and we won't do it again.

 

The most generous interpretation of this letter is that here is an upstanding citizen, who also happens to be the fourth richest person in the world, admitting that he and his people did some things that in retrospect might not have been the best choice, given what he knows now.  But hey, he's learned from his mistakes, and we should all feel better that Zuckerberg and his companies have admitted they messed up in what were understandably hard circumstances. 

 

Ranged against this rather anodyne letter are some cherished U. S. traditions such as freedom of speech and the rule of law.  Let's talk about the rule of law first.

 

In a recent issue of Touchstone magazine, professor of law Adam J. MacLeod outlines how the idea of rule by law rather than men arose during the reign of the Emperor Justinian (485-565).  Justinian caused twelve ivory tablets to be placed on public display, tablets that contained a concise summary of the laws of the land.  All disputes were to be decided on the basis of reasoning from what the tablets said, not from what somebody in power said.

 

In placing reason above power, the rule of law placed everyone on a much more equitable footing.  The peasant who could reason out law was now able to defend himself against a powerful lord who wanted to take his land, if the peasant could show what the lord was trying to do was against the law.  MacLeod admits that since the late 1800s, jurisprudence has largely abandoned the fundamentals that supported the rule of law, but in practice, vestiges of it remain.  No thanks to Zuckerberg, however, for those vestiges.

 

Although Facebook is not a branch of government, in bowing to White House pressure it acted as a government agent.  And its near-monopoly on social media channels makes it a powerful player in its ability to censor unfavored speech, such as people making fun of Anthony Fauci or other prominent players in the COVID-19 follies.  So where was the ivory tablet to which a satirical outfit such as the Babylon Bee could appeal when its posts disappeared?  Their only option was to mount a lawsuit that might take years, would certainly cost tons of money, and might in the end amount to nothing.  So much for the rule of law.

 

Some counter the claim that the principle of freedom of speech does not apply to private companies such as Facebook, because a private entity can allow or disallow anything it likes and be as capricious about it as they want.  If Facebook had the reach of my town paper, the San Marcos Daily Record, this argument would carry weight.  One little outlet being arbitrary about what it publishes is no big deal.  But Facebook, although not the only social-media show in town, is by far one of the largest, and its censorship, or lack thereof, hugely influences public discourse in the republic that is the United States, as it does in many other countries of the world with less of a tradition of free speech. 

 

Once again, while Facebook is not a government entity, when it takes actions that the government pressures it to do (either through legal means or simply jawboning), it becomes an agent of that government.  And while it is perhaps true that Facebook did not violate the letter of the First Amendment which prohibits only Congress from making a law that abridges the freedom of speech, the spirit of the law is that the Federal government as a whole—executive, judicial, or legislative—should refrain from suppressing the freedom of the people to express themselves in any way that is not comparable to yelling "Fire!" falsely in a crowded theater. 

 

There are two extremes to which we might go in this situation, at opposite ends from the muddled middle in which we presently find ourselves.  One extreme would be to treat near-monopolies such as Facebook as "common carriers" like the old Ma Bell used to be.  With very few exceptions, nobody regulated what you could say over the telephone, and in the common-carrier model, Facebook would fire all its moderators and only retain the engineers who would keep hackers from crashing the entire system.  Other than that, anybody could say anything about anything.  Zuckerberg wouldn't censor anything, and I bet he'd be relieved to be rid of that little chore.

 

The other extreme would be to regulate the gazoo out of all social media and set up explicit "twelve-tablet"-like rules as to what can and can't be said on it.  We have something like this model in the way the Federal Communications Commission regulates what can be said or shown over the (public) airwaves (not cable).  The FCC is mostly concerned with obscene or indecent content, but that's just a historical fluke.  In a republic you can vote to regulate anything you want.  This would be a return to the pre-deregulation days of inefficient but reliable airline and phone service.  It would be duller and more predictable, but there are worse things than dull.

 

Neither of these extremes will come to pass, but the present near-total governmental inaction in either direction leaves a political vacuum in which Mark Zuckerberg, emperor of social media, will continue to do what he thinks best, and the rest of us simply have to deal with it.  And the rule of law and freedom of speech will continue to suffer.

 

Sources:  I referred to an Associated Press article "Zuckerberg says the White House pressured Facebook over some COVID-19 content during the pandemic," at https://apnews.com/article/meta-platforms-mark-zuckerberg-biden-facebook-covid19-463ac6e125b0d004b16c7943633673fc.  Zuckerberg's letter to Congress is at

https://x.com/JudiciaryGOP/status/1828201780544504064/photo/1, and I also referred to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires.  Adam J. MacLeod's "How Law Lost Its Way" appeared on pp. 22-28 of the Sept/Oct 2024 issue of Touchstone.

 

Averse to the Metaverse

 

The company Meta, formerly known as Facebook, sparked some criticism after it opened its keynote "Horizon Worlds" virtual-reality (VR) platform to France and Spain last week.  According to an article in Slate, new European users were disappointed in the graphics, to say the least.  And judging by the screen shots provided in the article, they have a point.  Adjectives like "bland," "cartoonish," and "slightly weird" come to mind.  In common with many VR systems, only the upper bodies of human avatars appear.  I've never understood the reason for this myself, but one user speculated that it was so that nobody online can have sex. 

 

At any rate, it doesn't sound like the French are going to start holding meetings of the Académie Française in Horizon Worlds any time soon.  But Mark Zuckerberg can live without the Academy's forty members if he can get several million mere mortals to join.

 

Meta has put a huge chunk of its colossal resources into its metaverse venture, some $13 billion, and you can be sure the firm is not doing that for fun.  Its vision is that as Internet bandwidth and access increase, you will be able to don a VR headset and basically live life online:  working, playing, even exercising (I suppose, but this might present problems unless you're doing it on some physical treadmill tied to your VR system).  As for sex, there's plenty of that on the Internet already, so maybe Meta is staying out of that area purely for business reasons. 

 

There is a theory in the history-of-technology field called "technological determinism."  It basically says that technology has its own built-in direction, and once a technology develops into a feasible, marketable form, there's no stopping it.  Its development path and growth are intrinsic to the nature of the technology, and human factors and influences count for nothing.  The term was invented mainly by people who didn't believe in it to criticize those who appeared to support it, but I've never encountered a pure card-carrying technological determinist. 

 

Nevertheless, a lot of stories of how technologies developed tend to make it seem inevitable in retrospect.  I think this betrays a lack of imagination on the part of the storyteller, and some of the best histories of technology I have encountered look at failed technologies that might have succeeded if certain almost random factors had gone the other way. 

 

With "Horizon Worlds" we are witnessing the first baby steps of a new technology which Meta, at least, hopes will inevitably dominate the Internet and become as much a part of our lives as mobile phones—and all they can do—have become today.  And, as any good public corporation will try to do, Meta intends to turn this into cash—lots of cash.

 

The Slate article quotes a University of Virginia professor's dark prophecy that Meta hopes to "monitor, monetize, and manage everything about our lives."  While this is no doubt an exaggeration, it's hard to deny that the picture conjured up by proponents of VR, especially the Meta-style of VR, seems to aspire toward a kind of totalizing, all-inclusive situation in which people would take off their VR headsets only to attend to physical needs, like eating, going to the bathroom, and (maybe) sex.  And sleep, unless we manage to genetic-engineer our way out of that little necessity.

 

In promulgating his Meta vision, Zuckerberg and his colleagues suffer from a problem that they has in common with many tech-savvy leaders who combine awesome technical and business skills with the philosophical understanding of ten-year-old boys.  There are various answers to the question, "What are humans for?"  Different cultures and religions come up with different answers, but the worst response of all to that question is to ignore it altogether. 

 

Any entity whose business operations affect millions or even billions of people, as Facebook/Meta's does, should consider seriously what its model for human flourishing is.  And the bigger the firm is, the more seriously it should consider that question. 

 

Unfortunately, this rarely happens.  Instead, a business like Meta is in practice avoiding two guardrails on opposite sides of a wide road.  One guardrail is profits:  if the firm ceases to make money going forward, something has to be done to avoid the guardrail of losses that kill the firm.  The other guardrail is a combination of law and public criticism.  Even a profitable business can go out of existence if its leaders end up in jail or become social pariahs, as the Weinstein Company did when its head Harvey Weinstein was accused (and eventually convicted) of sexual misdeeds.  As long as a firm avoids hitting these two guardrails, its leaders will consider it a success, and will keep doing whatever they feel is necessary to keep going, regardless of the firm's effects on the souls of its millions of customers.

 

Aesthetics are more than just a thing that has to meet minimum standards in order for people to use a platform like "Horizon Worlds."  Aesthetics is another word for beauty.  In the past, advances in technology have led to the creation of beautiful things that make the world a better place.  Advances in building technology led to artistic creations such as Chartres in France and Burgos in Spain.  Cathedrals were designed for the ordinary human, just like "Horizon Worlds" is.  But those who built the cathedrals of the Middle Ages were guided by a very specific vision of human purpose:  to encounter, and eventually to love, the Divine.  Their creations gained thereby a timelessness that motivates even a secular culture such as that of France's today to reconstruct Notre Dame after its disastrous fire, at a cost of millions of dollars.

 

The metaverse can be a place of truth, beauty, and goodness.  But those values can be achieved only if those designing it make these values intentional goals.  On the other hand, if their guides are only the two guardrails of profit and avoiding jail or pariah status, they are likely to forge an erratic path that may lead millions of people to places they wish they hadn't gone to.

 

Sources:  The article "Why the Metaverse Has to Look So Stupid" by Nitish Pahwa appeared on Slate's website on Aug. 19, 2022 at https://slate.com/technology/2022/08/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-horizon-worlds-facebook-looks-crappy-explained.html. 

Is Cryptocurrency the Future of Money?

 

The Silicon-Valley firm Nvidia recently got in trouble with the SEC for not disclosing that a good bit of its profits in 2018 were due to sales of their graphics processing units to cryptominers.  Cryptominers verify cryptocurrency transactions in operations that take a vast amount of computing power, real electrical power, and cooling.  One estimate quoted in a recent Associated Press story says that cryptominers making Bitcoin, only one of several types of cryptocurrency, use up 0.2% of the world's electrical supply. 

 

The reason the SEC fined Nvidia $5.5 million was that cryptocurrency, and presumably the cryptomining that goes along with it, is notoriously volatile.  In the SEC's judgment, Nvidia should have told its investors that a lot of their 2018 profits came fron the up-and-down business of cryptomining.

 

For a firm with $26 billion in revenue, $5.5 million is chump change, and most of the damage to Nvidia was already done once the press releases came out.  But the SEC's action bespeaks a larger prevalent attitude that government institutions, at least in the U. S., have toward cryptocurrency.  If a company can get in trouble merely for selling their products to cryptominers and not telling their investors about it, the SEC must be really down on cryptocurrency.

 

And this is not a surprise.  Whoever came up with the idea of Bitcoin in 2008 clearly wanted to leave governments and their meddling with currency behind.  In a sense, cryptocurrency is a libertarian's dream:  nobody controls it and nobody can do Federal-Reserve-type manipulations to it or attempt to tie it to any particular conventional currency.  A unit of cryptocurrency is worth exactly what people will pay for it—no more and no less.

 

In retrospect (Monday-morning quarterbacks are always right), it was almost foreordained that the few lucky people who bought bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies as they were issued ended up making fantastic profits, at least on paper (or bits).  But after the first cryptocurrency-rush days, the crypto market turned into something resembling the futures market for hog bellies,  but without the inconvenience of having to keep a lot of smelly hog bellies around.

 

And unlike hog bellies, cryptocurrency uses a lot of energy, much of which is generated with fossil fuels that increase the globe's burden of carbon dioxide.  That bothers some people more than others, but it is a definite downside to cryptocurrency compared to more conventional media of exchange.

 

Another factor that gives cryptocurrency a somewhat shady reputation is that it has proved very popular with international criminals.  An untraceable, serial-number-free virtual currency is just what the drug dealers and online extortionists like to use, and many of these types will not accept any other kind of money.  (I'm told this—I've never tried to pay a drug dealer myself, either with cryptocurrency or cash.)

 

So with those counts against it, one shouldn't be too surprised that although cryptocurrency has been accepted in certain circles and by at least one government as legal tender (El Salvador), its progress is slow.

 

While some may view the advance of cryptocurrency as progress, in some ways it marks a return to a system that prevailed in the early and mid-19th century in the U. S.  While the U. S. government (and the Confederacy during the Civil War) issued its own currency, many private banks chartered by state governments also issued their own currency.  In a given locality, you might have businesses trading in three or four different kinds of money, and so someone would have to keep an exchange chart stating what their comparative worths were. 

 

And volatility was also an inevitable consequence of that system.  Private banks could flood the market with bills or even go broke, rendering the currency they issued worthless.  In a time before the telegraph had penetrated to most parts of the U. S., a store might take in payment a bunch of bills issued by the Pawtucket State Bank of North Carolina, only to learn a few days later that the bank had ceased to exist.

 

Of course, all paper money back then was exchangeable at some rate with gold, which was the main medium of monetary exchange between governments.  There are stories of one company loading a ton or so of gold bullion onto a ship at Port A bound for Port B, and another company loading a ton of gold onto a ship in Port B bound for Port A.  Besides being downright silly, such mechanical exchanges were prone to the hazards of ocean travel.  If one of your ships went down with your gold bullion, you were out of luck.

 

That can't happen with bitcoin, but it can certainly "sink" metaphorically, and has numerous times, wiping out value just as effectively as if it was a pile of gold bars going down to Davy Jones's locker.  As long as cryptocurrency developers insist on staying independent of government control, it seems like volatility will be part of the game.  And that means only people who like to take lots of risks anyway (e. g. drug dealers and online shakedown artists) will accept the risk of volatility for the anonymity and other advantages cryptocurrency has for their business models, if we can call them that.

 

Three years ago, Facebook launched its own version of cryptocurrency, then called Libra.  Originally, they tried to tie it to a basket of currencies, but regulators nixed that idea.  Then it was rebranded as Diem, and tied to the dollar, but reportedly the Federal Reserve pressured the bank involved to cut its ties with the organization, thus dooming it.  If a substantial outfit like Facebook can't launch a modified cryptocurrency that has some promise to maintain a stable value, it looks like nobody else will try any time soon. 

 

So for the foreseeable future, all five minutes of it, cryptocurrency looks like it will remain a fringe enterprise, enjoyed by a few rich risk-takers, disappointing others who buy it at the wrong time, and having a core constituency of users whose characters are dubious, to say the least. 

 

Sources:  The AP story about Nvidia's fine by the SEC appeared in numerous outlets, including the Sacramento Bee at https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article261167522.html.  A report on the fate of Facebook's Libra can be found at https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/25/22901830/facebook-meta-libra-diem-crypto-project-explores-sale.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Nvidia and cryptocurrency.  My blog on Libra when it came out in 2019 is at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2019/06/is-facebooks-libra-cash-in-your-future.html.

Will Facebook Kill Holly?

 

I have to be careful about how I write today's column.  I do not want to betray any trusts.  But on the other hand, a topic that up to now has been an abstraction for me has become personal.  A statistic has turned into someone I know by only two degrees of separation.  To protect anonymity, I have changed names and some details of what I will write here.  But I assure you that what I am going to write is based on facts as personally told to me yesterday by someone I will call Holly, who is a twelve-year-old girl.

 

Facebook, which has now renamed itself Meta, has been in the news a lot lately, and in this column as well, because of revelations by a whistleblower named Frances Haugen.  Haugen is a former Facebook employee who has made thousands of pages of internal company documents public, and has testified to Congress that Facebook's own research showed how harmful Instagram and other Facebook services are to teenagers (girls especially) at the same time that Facebook's CEO (and owner of 55% of Facebook's voting stock) Mark Zuckerberg was saying that his firm did not have such data.  The blowback from articles in the Wall Street Journal and other outlets detailing the hypocritical actions of Zuckerberg and his company have been so severe that the firm dropped plans it had announced to develop a new service for preteens called Instagram Kids. 

 

A recent article on the Mind Matters website described these problems and quoted results of a 2017 survey by the UK's Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement that showed, among other damning evidence, that the average age at which a child creates an Instagram account is 10, even though the software says you must be at least 13 to join.  Among users aged 14 to 24, all but one of the social-media platforms surveyed showed a negative score for well-being. 

 

With all this as a background, let me introduce Holly.  My wife and I have known her slightly for at least a couple of years, and when she was ten she invited us to see her elementary school's production of Peter Pan, which for an older couple with no children was quite a treat.  Although she has since moved to a nearby town, she has the opportunity to visit us now and then, and yesterday was one of those visits.

 

Holly is one of those girls who will rattle on about whatever she's doing if you just stand there and look interested, so my wife and I invited her in and we listened to what she had to say about what she'd been doing since we saw her almost a year ago.  She talked about horses, a vacation trip her family took back East, and then school.  She attends school in a medium-size town that has a reputation for old-fashioned conservative family values, and if something bad is happening there, it's probably happening everywhere else too. 

 

She had her smartphone with her, of course, and as she took it out she said her parents have put some controls on it to limit her social-media use.  While I cannot recall her exact words, the following is substantially what she said next, when we asked her how things have gone at school with COVID-19. 

 

"Oh, it's been bad.  One of my friends committed suicide over the summer.  They were bullying her and it just got so bad she couldn't take it anymore.  That's why I don't mind my folks doing what they did to my phone."

 

After Holly left and I had a chance to think about the enormity of what she told me, it began to sink in that here was a twelve-year-old girl having to deal with the suicide of a personal friend of hers, caused at least in part by the baleful influence of social media. 

 

I don't know anything about this incident other than what Holly told me.  Scientists would call this "anecdotal evidence" and dismiss it as useless for analytical purposes.  But it brings home the diabolical influence of social media on children in a way that no amount of statistics or studies have done for me.  Somewhere there are parents of the sixth-grader who committed suicide who will never see their daughter reach adulthood, get married, or have children of her own.  And during the girl's lifetime, because she was one of the twenty-two million users of Instagram or whatever social media platform contributed to her death, she enriched Mark Zuckerberg personally by some amount of dollars he could charge for ads on her phone.  I hope he enjoys them now, because he won't get a chance to enjoy them where he's going.

 

Holly, at the tender age of twelve, already seems to have a realistic sense of how dangerous social media can be.  And, Lord willing, this sense will preserve her from the hazards of using Facebook products when one is a teenage girl.  But she has all of her teenage years to negotiate ahead of her, and she is not out of the social-media woods yet.

 

We live in an age that is hostile to children and teenagers in many ways.  If a child manages to survive the first nine months of its existence in the womb without being aborted, as about 600,000 children are each year in the U. S., she or he becomes a kind of hobby that our economy tolerates but does not encourage—a "lifestyle choice" that burdens the otherwise ideal worker with expenses and obligations that distract him or her from being totally devoted to the job and to consumption of products and services such as Facebook.  Upon entering school, an institution that was formerly safeguarded from commercial exploitation back in the 1960s when I experienced it, the child becomes the target of 24/7 ads from streaming services, the various entertainment platforms such as video games, and eventually from smartphones.  Arrayed against each individual child is the Big Tech oligopoly of world-class expertise that extracts the last drop of attention with manipulative artificial-intelligence-enhanced algorithms that do things no ordinary human being can understand, algorithms that can intensify social interactions into a tornado of abuse that makes death at one's own hand look like the only alternative. 

 

We prayed with Holly before she left, for protection from the many dangers that life as a girl in America presents today.  God is more powerful that Mark Zuckerberg.  But Mark Zuckerberg doesn't seem to think so.

 

Sources:  I thank Denyse O'Leary for drawing my attention to the article "Facebook's . . . Er, Meta's Instagram Problem" by Heather Zeiger, which appeared at https://mindmatters.ai/2021/12/facebookser-metas-instagram-problem/. 

Downsides of the Metaverse

 

One important task of the discipline of engineering ethics is to take a look at new technologies and say in effect, "Wait a minute—what could go wrong here?"  Blogger Joe Allen at the website Salvo has done that with the Metaverse idea recently touted by Mark Zuckerberg, when Zuckerberg announced that Facebook will now be known (officially, anyway) as Meta.

 

Allen denies that Zuckerberg was merely trying to distract attention away from the recent bad publicity Facebook has been receiving, and claims that the Metaverse idea is something Zuckerberg and others have been dreaming of for years, especially proponents of the quasi-philosophy known as transhumanism.  What are these dreams?

 

In the Metaverse of the future, you will be able to put on virtual-reality equipment such as goggles or a helmet, and enter an alternate universe fabricated in the same way that the Facebook universe, or the many MMOG (massively multiplayer online games) systems try to do in a comparatively feeble way today.  But the goal of metaverse technology is to make the simulation better than ordinary reality, to the point that you'll really want to stay there. 

 

It's not hard to imagine downsides for this picture.  Allen quotes Israeli author Yuval Harari as saying that mankind's power to "create religions" combined with Metaverse technology will lead to "more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era."  The Nazis could do no more than put on impressive light shows and hire people such as Leni Riefenstahl to produce propaganda films such as "Triumph of the Will."  Imagine what someone like Joseph Goebbels could have done if he had been put in charge of an entire metaverse, down to every last detail.

 

Impossible?  Facebook and other companies are investing billions to make it happen, and Allen points out that companies are also lobbying Washington to spend federal money on developing the infrastructure needed to support the massive bandwidth and processing power that it will take. 

 

COVID-19 pushed many of us a considerable distance toward the Metaverse when we had to begin meeting people on Zoom rather than in person.  Zoom is better than not meeting people at all, I suppose, but it already has contributed in a small way to a breakdown in what I'd call decorum.  For example, judges have had to reprimand lawyers for coming to hearings on Zoom while lying in bed with no clothes on. And I've talked on Zoom with students who wouldn't dream of showing up in class with what they were wearing in the privacy of their bedrooms, in which I found myself a reluctant virtual guest.

 

Of course, if we had the Metaverse, the lawyer could appear as an avatar in a top hat, tuxedo, and tails if that was what the judge wanted to see.  But the point is that there is a whole complex of social-interaction rules or guidelines that children take years to learn (if they ever do learn), and in a Metaverse, those rules would be set by whoever or whatever is running the system, not just by the individuals involved.

 

Zuckerberg insists, according to Allen, that his Metaverse will be "human-centered."  That may be true, but a maximum-security prison is human-centered too—designed to keep certain humans in the center of the prison.  While Facebook has its positive features—my wife just learned through it yesterday of the passing of an old family friend—the damage it has done to what was formerly called civil discourse, and the sheer amount of bile that social media sites have profited from, show us that even with the relatively low-tech means we currently have, the downsides of corporate-mediated social interactions reach very low points indeed.

 

Does this mean we should jump in with a bunch of government regulations before the genie gets out of the bottle?  Oddly, Zuckerberg is calling for some kind of regulation even now.  But as Allen points out, Zuckerberg may be thinking that eventually, even government power will take a back seat to the influence that the corporate-controlled Metaverse will have over things.

 

Those who see religions as creations of the human brain, and human reality as something to be created from scratch and sold at a profit—these are defective views of what humanity is, as Pope St. John Paul II pointed out with respect to the anthropology of Marxism.  Transhumanist fantasies about recreating the human universe in our image share with Marxism the belief that human beings are the summit of intelligent life, and there is nothing or no One else out there to be considered as we remake the virtual world to be whatever we want it to be.  Even if you grant the dubious premise that the Zuckerbergs of the world merely want to make life better for us all instead of just getting richer, you have to ask the question, "What does 'better' mean to you?"  And whether the machinery is Communist or capitalist, the bottom-line answer tends to be the satisfaction of personal desires. 

 

Any system, human or mechanical, that leaves God out of the picture leads people down a garden path that ends in slavery, as John Bunyan's Pilgrim discovered in Pilgrim's Progress.  Before we are compelled to join the Metaverse in order to earn a living, we should take a very hard look at what those who are planning it really want to do.  Once again, we have a chance to set a new technology on the right path before we let it go on to produce mega-disasters we then have to learn from.  It's the engineers who come up with this stuff, and in view of the lack of interest or even comprehension that government representatives have for such things, perhaps it's the engineers who need to ask the hard questions about what could go wrong with the Metaverse—before it does. 

 

Sources:  Joe Allen's article "The Metaverse:  Heaven for Soy Boys, Hell on Earth for Us" is on the Salvo website at https://salvomag.com/post/the-metaverse-heaven-for-soy-boys-hell-on-earth-for-us.  I also referred to an article on John Paul II's views on anthropology and Marxism at https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/jpii-anthropology.

Should Kids Use Instagram?

 

In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal published "The Facebook Files," a series of investigative reports that was partially based on internal documents leaked by a whistleblower.  The overall impression left by the revelations is one of hypocrisy:  a company saying in public how seriously they take their responsibility to protect their users from harm and police their content, but in private giving free passes for certain favored "whitelisted" users and conducting research that reveals how harmful Instagram can be to teenagers, especially girls.

 

Just how harmful is it?

 

Time Magazine's summary of the WSJ articles includes such tidbits as the following.  Internal research presented at Facebook showed in 2019 that "Instagram makes body image issues worse for one in three teen girls."  Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, "6% of American users traced the issue to the photo-sharing app."  Eating disorders and depression are also linked to Instagram use by young people, which according to the article comprise about half of Instagram's user base.  "Young" was not defined, but presumably we are talking about people in their teens and early 20s.

 

In a Congressional hearing held Sept. 30 in response to the revelations, Facebook's Antigone Davis, the firm's global head of safety, disagreed with how the WSJ characterized the company's research.  She emphasized that users benefit from Instagram, which helps them in dealing with the hard issues that beset teens.  The reason for the research, she said, was "to make our platform better, to minimize the bad and maximize the good, and to proactively identify where we can improve."  But on Monday, the firm announced that it was pausing its work on a product tentatively called Instagram Kids, designed for users under 13.  Of course, anybody who is old enough to type and read can say they are 13 and try to get an Instagram account today, and millions have succeeded. 

           

One Senator drew a parallel between Facebook and the tobacco industry, which concealed internal research for years showing that smoking caused lung cancer and publicly denied the facts it knew about privately.  Suicide isn't lung cancer, but dead is dead.  While it's unlikely that a statistically significant number of teen suicides can be definitely linked to Instagram, it is an unvarnished fact that teen suicides in the U. S. have risen dramatically since the early 2000s, rising from a rate of about 10 per 100,000 in age group 15-19 to 14.5 per 100,000 by 2017, the latest year for which national numbers are available.  And COVID-19 has not improved matters in that regard.

 

Correlation is not causation, and there are many factors besides Instagram that make it hard for teenagers to negotiate life these days.  But the question before us is this:  does the harm done by Instagram (and similar photo-based media) to teenagers outweigh whatever perceived benefits the services provide?

 

Phrased that way, the question implies that the proper way to analyze this issue is a cost-benefit study.  But I'm not at all sure that's the right way to do it.  For one thing, the benefits are of many different kinds, as are the costs.

 

The most obvious benefit is financial, to Facebook, its investors, and similar media giants, along with their advertisers who pay Facebook gargantuan fees to sell goods and services.  Another category of benefit is whatever good feelings, sensations, and experiences users get from using Instagram and similar products.  The parallel to tobacco is relevant, because studies both by Facebook and outsiders show that social-media use is highly addictive, and is purposely designed to be that way.  This is an open secret, deplored even by some developers of social media, but it is well known and needs to be considered in any discussion. 

 

It's one thing if a mature, responsible adult decides to indulge in an addictive product, but there are reasons that states have minimum ages for purchasing tobacco and alcohol.  Society has made a judgment that teenagers below a certain age need to be protected from these substances, because their ability to judge such matters as alcohol or tobacco use is not yet fully developed.  Having been a teenager myself, I can vouch for the truth of that statement.

 

Some states such as Texas have already taken steps to restrict certain social-media firm activities such as banning individuals based on political content.  If we as a society decide that the benefits of Instagram to teens are not worth the harms, we could try to make it illegal for them to use it.  Under the present social dispensation, that idea sounds almost ludicrous.  But in 1965, who would have imagined that a scant thirty years or so later, smokers would be a disdained minority, unable to light up in workplaces, restaurants, or bars, and condemned to puff in freezing weather at least twenty feet from the nearest entrance?  Yet it happened, and a big factor in the social turn against smoking was the blatant hypocrisy the tobacco firms indulged in, as investigations later showed.

 

I have had at least one young person talk to me wistfully about what it was like growing up without social media, saying that he thought his smartphone was one of the biggest differences between my generation and his, and not a good one, either.  As powerful as the tobacco interests were, their wings were clipped, and they paid huge sums to states in retribution for the harms that were caused. 

 

I don't know what's going to happen to Facebook in the future with regard to their teenage customers.  In the Greek myth about Antigone, she got into trouble with a king who had defeated and killed her brother in battle, and who didn't want anyone mourning for him or burying him.  She tried to anyway, and ended up committing suicide. 

 

Facebook's Antigone Davis may be trying to bury some facts that refuse to stay buried.  With regard to the whistleblower who leaked internal data to the press, she said, "We've committed to not retaliating for this individual speaking to the Senate."  But a lawyerly reading of that sentence shows it says nothing about not retaliating for anything else the person did.  And if the experience of other whistleblowers is any guide, that person's career in social media is over, and they might as well start studying for their real-estate license or something else they can do on their own.

 

Sources:  I refereed to an NPR article on the Facebook revelations and Antigone Davis's remote testimony before Congress at https://www.npr.org/2021/09/30/1041864356/instagram-kids-safety-congress-hearing, as well as a Time article at https://time.com/6097704/facebook-instagram-wall-street-journal/.  The statistics on teen suicide are from https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/7/11/18759712/teen-suicide-depression-anxiety-how-to-help-resources.