[Plura-list] Ad-tech as a bubble overdue for a bursting; The largest strike in human history; Soviet computing graveyard

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Ad-tech as a bubble overdue for a bursting: Upton Sinclair was an
optimist.

* The largest strike in human history: The Shock Doctrine's breaking-point.

* Soviet computing graveyard: Recovering a Saratov-2 from presumed
extinction.

* This day in history: 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🧦 Ad-tech as a bubble overdue for a bursting

In my book "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism" I point out that the
claims for Big Tech powers of behavior modification powers emanate from
the companies' own self-serving boasts pitched to bring in new ad-tech
customers.

https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

I point to the thinness of the external research on ad-tech's efficacy,
and the replication failures of its research foundations on things like
"sentiment analysis," "microexpressions" and "Big 5 Personalities" - the
whole panoply of digital phrenology.

Meanwhile, there are undeniable, easily measured means by which Big Tech
modifies our behavior that don't require us to treat marketing puffery
as ground truth.

* If you want to talk to your friends you have to use Facebook because
Mark Zuckerberg is holding them hostage with monopoly tactics

* Google uses monopoly rents to buy its way to search default on every
platform, so the answer to every question you ask comes from Google

* Apple gets to decide which apps you're allowed to use, who can fix
your devices, and when you have to throw them away and buy new ones,
thanks to DRM and lavish spending to kill dozens of Right to Repair
initiatives

These are mass-scale, persistent behavior modifications that have
nothing to do with psychological manipulation and everything to do with
economic chicanery.

This week on the Freakonomics podcast, Stephen Dubner turns an economic
lens on Big Tech's ad-tech boasts.

He talks to Steve Tadelis, an academic economist who once headed a
program at Ebay to evaluate the efficacy of ad spending. First they
tried eliminating "brand" advertising (that is, advertising buys for the
word "ebay") and found that there was no drop in their revenues.

The logic behind Ebay buying ads for "ebay" is that if they don't, their
competitors will, so a search for "ebay" will bring up links to Amazon.
That happened...and people scrolled right past the Amazon ads to the
"organic" Ebay link below the ads.

But Ebay also buys a bunch of keyword ads for products, like "guitar" or
"washing machine" or "picture frame." They estimated 5% of their revenue
came from these ads, and that every $1 they spent on them brought in $1.50.

Tadelis designed another experiment and found that these ads were
actually responsible for 0.5% of their revenue - an order of magnitude
less than their estimate - and that every $1 they spent generated $0.60
in *losses*. They cut $100m from their ad-spending.

But despite publication of these findings, the world increased its
ad-tech spending. Tadelis attributes this to the fact that the major
players in ad-tech are all incentivized to repeat the unsubstantiated
tale of ad-tech's efficacy.

Ad-tech companies, publishers, and ad-tech buying consultancies are all
compromised and unable to objectively assess whether ads work (cue Upton
Sinclair: "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his
salary depends on his not understanding it").

And, of course, now Big Tech's critics have joined the ranks of those
who insist that ad-tech works with spooky, devastating efficacy.

For evidence, all of them point to how much money the industry generates.

Why would people buy these products if they didn't work? Well, the
obvious answer is, "That happens all the time." See:

* Multivitamins

* Hedge funds

But there's another answer: "it's a bubble."

A recent, excellent book on the ad-tech bubble is Tim Hwang's SUBPRIME
ATTENTION CRISIS:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

Hwang tells Dubner that in a bubble, "the red lights are flashing but
everybody in the industry just refuses to take a look at the real data."

Bubbles thrive on opacity and complexity. Think of the 2008 financial
crisis, where the lack of transparency in "toxic assets" was compounded
by their complexity, which led people - including "sophisticated"
regulators and investors - to trust them.

They assumed that the manifest absurdity of the claims made by CDO
salespeople must reflect their own ignorance. After all, all those OTHER
people wouldn't spend trillions on derivatives if they weren't safe
enough to buy yourself and exercise regulatory forbearance over.

But as Hwang points out, the ad-tech market is built on garbage. By
Google's own reckoning, 60% of the ads that are charged for are never
seen by any human being - literally the majority of the industry's
product is a figment of feverish machine imaginations.

While Google's own research (and that of other Big Tech players) show
that ad-tech works, independent researchers find the opposite: switching
from "behavioral" (surveillance) ads to "contextual" ads only reduces
clickthrough by 5%.

Behavioral ad clickthroughs are 0.01-0.03%, and much of that is bot
activity.

The industry is opaque and incestuous. Ad agencies - nominally working
for advertisers - get massive kickbacks from ad-tech platforms for
bringing them business.

Proctor and Gamble - the company that invented the concept of brand ads
- tried taking $200m out of its online ad spend and saw *zero* change in
sales.

And yet, ad-tech spending continues to rise.

Hwang says we need a "punk rock" National Bureau of Economic Research,
an org that will neutrally measure ad-tech performance and slowly
deflate the bubble rather than bursting it, because an ad-tech collapse
would kill ad-supported media.

All this is kind of a microcosm for the problems of economics in
general. For decades, economics was dominated by the neoclassical idea
of "homo economicus," a rational utility maximizer whose bad choices
were good, actually.

(That's still the cartoon that undergrads get)

Advertising - especially brand ads - is grounded in the idea that
irrationality is universal and exploitable, that you can trick people
into paying a 50,000% markup by slapping a logo on a t-shirt.

But advertisers - and the industry - assume *they* are immune to
irrationality, that they don't need to worry that they themselves will
be suckered by slick sales-patter from ad tech, or their agencies.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🧦 The largest strike in human history

Last week, the largest organized strike in human history shut down
India. 250,000,000 people struck against Indian PM Narendra Modi's
neoliberal reforms to the agricultural sector.

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/12/3/india_protests_modi_neoliberal_reforms

These reforms don't just remove the collective bargaining and price
controls that protect the ag sector (which employs more than half the
Indian working population), but also stripped multinational corporations
and government of liability for harms to their workers.

All this while unemployment is at 27%, and 76% of rural Indians lack the
funds to cover their basic nutritional needs. Meanwhile Indian
billionaires have increased their wealth by 35% during the pandemic.
India's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, has made $12m per *hour* since March.

The strike didn't just turn out unemployed people and farmers: the
turnout was driven by acts of solidarity from ever sector of society.

In his discussion with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, P Sainath offers
some really important political context.

Modi has had a comfortable Congressional majority for two years and has
three years left to go in his mandate, so why did he wait for the
pandemic to make this far-reaching power-grab?

Sainath: "The reasoning was, these blokes are on their knees now. They
can’t organize. They can’t hit back. And in fact, many leading
neoliberal intellectuals, economists and journalists, editors, incited
the government, saying, 'Never waste a good crisis.'"

It's shock doctrine shit, in other words. But Modi badly misjudged the
moment: rather than being beating beyond resistance, Indians have been
beaten to the sticking point, and will no longer be fooled by religious
bigotry and neoliberal fairy tales.

Right wing movements around the world are grounded in the idea that some
people are born to rule and the rest of us are born to be ruled over.
Antimajoritarian philosophy isn't compatible with democracy, because it
requires sustained turkeys-voting-for-Christmas to survive.

As India shows, the traditional tools of antimajoritarianism -
xenophobia, sectarianism, armed violence - are unstable in the long run.
Eventually there comes a point when you can't just shout "Muslims are
scary!" at starving people and expect them to take that for an answer.

Indians have been slaughtered by both covid and mismanagement. They are
at the breaking point. They are rising up.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🧦 Soviet computing graveyard

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union started to clone DEC's PDP workhorse
minicomputers, especially the PDP-8, which was replicated in the USSR as
the Saratov-2. Today, the Saratov-2 is a distant memory, with not even a
single high-quality photo of the system online.

Until now. Russian urban explorer Ralph Mirebs's photos of a "Soviet
Computing Cemetery" (location undisclosed) that features the rotting
remains of a Saratov-2 amid the ashes and fire-suppresant residue of a
long-ago data-center blaze.

https://rusue.com/cemetery-of-soviet-computers/

The Saratov-2 was wild: it didn't have a microprocessor; rather, it was
broken down into components, each in its own drawer: a 12-bit computing
unit, I/O, RAM (ferromagnetic cubes).

Also present in the cemetery: an Electronics 100/25 - the Soviet version
of the PDP-11 - and some DVK-2Ms (early personal computers).

The author recalls their own computer science education in 1993, when
"one teaching DVK could distribute programs for a couple of dozen
Spectrums through the network."

One of my last trips before the crisis hit was my visit to the Computer
History Museum's boneyard - a massive warehouse filled with priceless
paleocomputing remnants. Though the location is a secret, they let me
take and post my photos:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe;_search=1&tags;=computerhistorymuseum&user;_id=37996580417%40N01&view;_all=1

It was the end of an incredibly educational day I spent with Museum
personnel, doing research for my case studies on the role that
adversarial interoperability played in competition in the tech industry:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

That day reminded me powerfully of my visit to St Petersburg's Popov
Museum in 2006, back when my (now dead) great-uncle Boris Rachman was
curator:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?user_id=37996580417%40N01&sort;=date-taken-desc&safe;_search=1&view;_all=1&tags;=popov

Soviet computing history is heroic in a way that's hard to put into
words: the constraints of the era - political, economic, material -
required so much ingenuity. Mirebs' photos for Russian Urban Exploration
were the best thing I've seen all weekend.


This day in history (permalink)

#5yrsago Solo: Hope Larson’s webcomic of rock-n-roll, romance, and
desperation
https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/07/solo-hope-larsons-webcomic-of-rock-n-roll-romance-and-desperation/

#5yrsago French Ministry of Interior wants to ban open wifi, Tor
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/france-looking-at-banning-tor-blocking-public-wi-fi/

#5yrsago READ: Kim Stanley Robinson’s first standalone story in 25
years! https://www.tor.com/2015/12/07/oral-argument-kim-stanley-robinson/

#1yrago A teenager describes his hilarious adventures installing a
surplus, 1,500lb mainframe in his parents’ basement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk

#1yrago The lawyer who caught UNC giving $2.5m to white nationalists
orders the white nationalists to create a $2.5m fund for Black students
or face a lawsuit
https://indyweek.com/news/orange/t-greg-doucette-threatens-to-sue-sons-of-confederate-veterans/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism
(https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/).

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel
about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 515 words (86836
total).

Currently reading: The City We Became, NK Jemisin

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 24)
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/11/23/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-24/

Upcoming appearances:

*  Monopoly, Not Mind Control: What's Really Happening With
"Surveillance Capitalism," Dec 8,
https://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20201208-doctorow//

* Colloquium on Information Security, Dec 14
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-31st-hphpe-virtual-colloquium-on-information-security-tickets-128859336745

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Upcoming appearances:

*  Monopoly, Not Mind Control: What's Really Happening With
"Surveillance Capitalism," Dec 8,
https://www.nuug.no/aktiviteter/20201208-doctorow/

* Colloquium on Information Security, Dec 14
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-31st-hphpe-virtual-colloquium-on-information-security-tickets-128859336745

* Keynote, NISO Plus, Feb 22-25,
https://niso.plus/cory-doctorow-to-keynote-at-niso-plus-2021/

Recent appearances:

* A More Competitive Web (Techdirt Podcast):
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201201/10183045801/techdirt-podcast-episode-264-more-competitive-web-with-cory-doctorow-daphne-keller.shtml

* Big Tech Podcast:
https://www.cigionline.org/big-tech/cory-doctorow-true-dangers-surveillance-capitalism

* Nerdcanon Podcast:
http://nerdcanon.com/episode-25-cory-doctorow-and-attack-surface/

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/web/accounts/303320

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and
advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/attachments/20201206/4de6ec4e/attachment.sig>