Publishing

A Line in the Sand

Doc Searls — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 13:00:00 +0000

There's a new side to choose. It helps that each of us is already on it.

Linux Journal was born in one fight and grew through a series of others.

Our first fight was for freedom. That began in 1993, when Phil Hughes started work toward a free software magazine. The fight for free software was still there when that magazine was born as Linux Journal in April 1994. Then a second fight began. That one was against all forms of closed and proprietary software, including the commercial UNIX variants that Linux would eventually defeat. We got in the fight for open source starting in 1998. (In 2005, I got a ribbon for my own small part in that battle.) And last year, we began our fight against what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, and Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger call re-engineering humanity.

This new fight is against actual and wannabe corporate and government overlords, all hell-bent on maintaining the caste system that reduces each of us to mere "consumers" and "data subjects" in a world Richard Brautigan described perfectly half a century ago in his poem "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace". You know, like The Matrix, only for real.

They'll fail, because no machine can fully understand human beings. Each of us is too different, too original, too wacky, too self-educating, too built for gaming every system meant to control us. (Discredit where due: we also suck in lots of ways. For example, Scott Adams is right that we're easy to hack with a good con.)

But why wait for nature to take its course when surveillance capitalists are busy setting civilization back decades or more—especially when we can obsolesce their whole business in the short term?

Here at Linux Journal, we're already doing our part by not participating in the surveillance business that digital advertising has mostly become, and by doing pioneering work in helping the online publishing business obey the wishes of its readers.

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What Is “Surveillance Capitalism?” And How Did It Hijack the Internet?

Augustine Fou — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 14:08:08 +0000

by Augustine Fou

Shoshana Zuboff's new book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism goes into gory details of how companies collect, use, buy and sell your data for profit, often without consent or even the consumer knowing it was happening, until disasters reveal some of the dark underbelly—like the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But, I’m a marketer, so I will focus on the subset of “surveillance marketing”—also known as “digital marketing”—where companies profit off of you, because they are set up to do so. Digital ad-tech companies were built to extract as much value as possible from the trust transaction that used to be the user going to a publisher’s site that carries an advertiser’s ad.

Surveillance Marketing Was Built on the Foundation of Three Myths

Digital marketing as we know it today can be traced all the way back to Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail, published in 2006. Before that, digital media was primarily purchased from large sites that had large human audiences. The Long Tail promulgated the idea that collectively a large number of small sites could rival the scale of a small number of large sites. This simple premise alone led digital marketing down a dark and dangerous path to the hell we now know is surveillance marketing. But most marketers don’t even know they are in this hell. They were looking for scale in digital—and they got it. They were looking for data in digital—and they got it. And, they were looking for more granular targeting in digital—and they got it. But how?

Herein lies the three myths: 1) the long tail, 2) behavioral targeting and 3) hypertargeting.

The Myth of the Long Tail

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Help Us Cure Online Publishing of Its Addiction to Personal Data

Doc Searls — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 15:02:38 +0000

by Doc Searls

Since the turn of the millennium, online publishing has turned into a vampire, sucking the blood of readers' personal data to feed the appetites of adtech: tracking-based advertising. Resisting that temptation nearly killed us. But now that we're alive, still human and stronger than ever, we want to lead the way toward curing the rest of online publishing from the curse of personal-data vampirism. And we have a plan. Read on.

This is the first issue of the reborn Linux Journal, and my first as Editor in Chief. This is also our first issue to contain no advertising.

We cut out advertising because the whole online publishing industry has become cursed by the tracking-based advertising vampire called adtech. Unless you wear tracking protection, nearly every ad-funded publication you visit sinks its teeth into the data jugulars of your browsers and apps to feed adtech's boundless thirst for knowing more about you.

Both online publishing and advertising have been possessed by adtech for so long, they can barely imagine how to break free and sober up—even though they know adtech's addiction to human data blood is killing them while harming everybody else as well. They even have their own twelve-step program.

We believe the only cure is code that gives publishers ways to do exactly what readers want, which is not to bare their necks to adtech's fangs every time they visit a website—and at the same time allow sponsors to do advertising the old fashioned way: without tracking.

We're doing that by reversing the way terms of use work. Instead of readers always agreeing to publishers' terms, publishers will agree to readers' terms. The first of these will say something like this:

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Let's talk advertising

Doc Searls — Sat, 06 Jan 2018 18:19:07 +0000

by Doc Searls

This is the first in a series of posts in which members of our still-small staff raise topics for discussion. Since I'm a veteran of both the journalism and advertising businesses, I'll start this discussion.

First, we're wiping all advertising off the Linux Journal site and starting with a clean slate. This is a bit complicated because we're also upgrading the site from Drupal 6 to 8, which is a bit like rebuilding an occupied house. So bear with us through that.

Second, if we ever go back to running ads, they won't be of the spying kind generally called "adtech." I have been an enemy of adtech from its start, and for years have led in the movement to kill it. I've done that through my work with ProjectVRM and its spinoff Customer Commons (both at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center), and here at Linux Journal (examples here, here, here, here and here).

As I say here,

"Adtech is a cancer on advertisers, publishers, and everybody it tracks.

We already have one form of chemo in ad blocking. According to PageFair’s 2017 Adblock Report, at least 11% of the world’s population is now blocking ads on at least 615 million devices. According to GlobalWebIndex, 37% of all mobile users, worldwide, were blocking ads by January of 2016, and another 42% would like to. With more than 4.77 billion mobile phone users in the world by 2017, that means more than 1.7 billion people are blocking ads already: a sum exceeding the population of the Western Hemisphere.

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Progress on Privacy

Doc Searls — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 11:30:36 +0000

by Doc Searls

The internet didn't come with privacy, any more than the planet did. But at least the planet had nature, which provided raw materials for the privacy technologies we call clothing and shelter. On the net, we use human nature to make our own raw materials. Those include code, protocols, standards, frameworks and best practices, such as those behind free and open-source software.

So far, our best privacy tech is encryption. But I won't dwell on that one, because I assume all Linux Journal readers are experts at that. Instead, I want to visit three others, all of which are new.

The first is agreements.

The most popular informal agreements in the physical world are called secrets. These aren't especially enforceable, but they are backed by norms, which are powerful constraints operating in a social context. For example, we trust that people, other than the intended recipient, won't open a sealed envelope, even if they can. The seal (such as the one shown in Figure 1) signals secrecy and has been in use for hundreds of years.

Figure 1. Seal Signaling Secrecy

More formal are the legal agreements we call terms. We encounter these every time we click "agree" to something that looks like what is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. The Legal Agreements We Call Terms

Did you read that? Go back and try reading it again.

These are "contracts of adhesion", defined (by the Legal Dictionary) as "a standardized contract offered to consumers on a 'take it or leave it' basis without giving the consumer an opportunity to bargain for terms that are more favorable". After industry won the industrial revolution, large companies needed to create legal agreements for dealing with up to millions of customers. Contracts of adhesion were the only way. Alas, this also sidelined freedom of contract, "which allows parties to provide for the terms and conditions that will govern the relationship" (says LawTeacher.net).

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