Everything They Know

Now, more than ever, as we work from home, gather with friends on social media, shop for groceries online, it feels like this tsunami of digital dependence and loss of personal privacy will wash over everything. That once these companies (and now governments) storm the beaches of our minds, they will not give those positions back peacefully. 

But that’s what they want. They want to feel inevitable. 

There will be time to organize, to fight back, to feel secure in the knowledge that your data, the information that represents your life and your loves and your thoughts and feelings, is not commoditized and weaponized. 

But first, we must learn, and we must share what we learn. We must know what we face, and the addictive, divisive, well-resourced, monolithically powerful companies we’re up against.

This argument about efficiency feels like it has seeped into every aspect of our society. We give up more and more of ourselves to tech companies because we want to use our time as efficiently as possible. We structure our economy in such a way that the entire success of our nation is determined by whether the growth of our Gross Domestic Product is sufficient. We’ve attempted on both a micro and macro level to remove serendipity, chance, and spontaneity as much as humanly possible. We drive where Waze (owned by google) tells us to drive, we listen to new artists that Spotify recommends for us, we watch new shows that Netflix recommends for us, we read the top results on Google that Google thinks will be most relevant for us. This is all so we can spend less time listening to bad records, watching shows that maybe we won’t like, or god forbid reading articles that don’t align with our own warped views of reality. 

We’ve given the algorithms control, and every day we give them more. In the name of more efficient solutions, more efficient uses of our time, more productivity, more shareholder value, our humanity has been forced to squeeze itself into these narrow pathways of digital interaction. 

It would be one thing if people were happier, if societally things were going great. But they...aren’t. This isn’t working. It’s time to turn the car around. Well, maybe not around, just take a different road. 

But how? 

This week’s episode of Everything They Know was supposed to be about a hypothetical dark future, where we’ve done nothing to rein in Big Tech and Surveillance Capitalism, where algorithmic prediction has gotten to 100% and has created perfect echo-bubbles for each of us, where authoritarian techno-governments and their cronies control every aspect of our physical lives, and where the time has past to take any meaningful action.

But as the Coronavirus has upended every aspect of life as we know it, and the world already seems a little darker, it felt untimely to release that episode. Instead, I decided to have a special conversation with one of our previous guests, and friend of the podcast, Judy Estrin, about how Covid-19 is deepening our reliance on technology even more. 

Now, this is a nuanced topic right now, because,in the positive, these technologies are actually enabling humanity to undergo this craziness collectively and remain connected in ways that would otherwise be impossible. I just finished taking a dance class on Instagram live, for goodness sake. 

But at the same time, we have authoritarian governments taking advantage of this time of expanded digital reliance and surveillance that is in danger of becoming normalized if not highlighted. There’s stories coming out of Singapore and China about people letting their phones run out of battery and police officers showing up at their apartments within 30 minutes. 

At the beginning of this series, I referenced one of my favorite authors, Yuval Harari. He came out with a piece in the Financial Times a few days ago that did a fantastic job of encapsulating my worries. 

He writes, “Even when infections from coronavirus are down to zero, some data-hungry governments could argue they needed to keep the biometric surveillance systems in place because they fear a second wave of coronavirus, or because there is a new Ebola strain evolving in central Africa, or because . . . you get the idea. A big battle has been raging in recent years over our privacy. The coronavirus crisis could be the battle’s tipping point. For when people are given a choice between privacy and health, they will usually choose health.”

So yes, right now, we must choose health. But in these uncertain times, we also must find balance. We must not give up too much. We must stay vigilant. 

Now, here’s my conversation from this week with Judy Estrin. 

In previous episodes we’ve looked at this issue of tech dominance from several angles. We’ve seen how they gather data, what they can do with it, how they make money from it, and how social media allows them to muddy the water and shape the narrative. You may have asked yourself along the way, “how can they do this? Why doesn’t the government do anything about it?” 

The seven largest tech companies spent nearly $500 million dollars lobbying Congress in the last decade. That sounds like a huge amount of money, but when you consider that they’ve gained trillions in market value during the same period of time, it was just money well spent.

This episode, we’ll dive into why government has dropped the ball on tech regulation to such an extreme degree, and what they might be able to still do to rein in the worst of these big tech behaviors. 

Featured guests this episode: 

K Krasnow Waterman was the Chief Information Officer of the first post-9/11 data analytics facility established by the White House and, next, led the reorganization of the FBI's intelligence operations. She has held a multitude of roles across the government and business worlds, as well as being a Sloan Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Michael Slaby was the Chief Technology Officer of Obama for America in 2008. In 2012, he rejoined the campaign as Chief Integration and Innovation Officer. When the campaign finished, he began work on social impact organizations that leverage technology to create social movements. Today, he's the Chief Strategist at Harmony Labs. 

Jonathon Morgan is the founder of Yonder, a fast-growing Authentic Internet company on a mission to give the online world the same amount of authentic cultural context as the offline world. Using artificial intelligence, we help organizations identify the groups and narratives that drive conversation, revealing what matters and creating the confidence to act.

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute and the author of Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

Katelyn Ringrose is a Christopher Wolf Diversity Fellow at the Future of Privacy Forum. She currently works on health and genetics privacy issues, and is tracking state and federal privacy legislation.

When I got on Facebook in 8th grade, it was worth somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million. By the time I was a junior in college, studying abroad in Senegal and forced to have a much more limited Internet experience, it was worth $50 billion. 

Today, it’s worth about $550 billion, the 5th most valuable company in the world. 

How did they do it? 

Well, it turns out your data is really, really valuable to advertisers. And the longer you stay on the platform, the more ads they can serve you, translating directly to more dollars in their pocket. 

What happened, is that they discovered anger and fear. Anger and fear drive more engagement than positivity and hope ever could -- and so that was the content their algorithm pushed. 

In the preparation for this episode, I asked a colleague for an introduction to a friend of his who I wanted to interview for this podcast, a former senior executive at a social media company. 

The response? 

“I sold. I’m out. I don’t want anyone to remember I was doing that.” 

Featured guests this episode: 

K Krasnow Waterman was the Chief Information Officer of the first post-9/11 data analytics facility established by the White House and, next, led the reorganization of the FBI's intelligence operations. She has held a multitude of roles across the government and business worlds, as well as being a Sloan Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tim Shea is the founder and CEO of Latticework Insights. 

Bryan Lane is the Director of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the General Services Administration.

Michael Slaby was the Chief Technology Officer of Obama for America in 2008. In 2012, he rejoined the campaign as Chief Integration and Innovation Officer. When the campaign finished, he began work on social impact organizations that leverage technology to create social movements. Today, he's the Chief Strategist at Harmony Labs. 

Eric Yang is the Founder and Executive Director at Junto. Junto is a new breed of social media founded in the spirit of authenticity, with the goal of rebalancing our relationship with technology and inspiring agency, privacy, and free expression. 

Jonathon Morgan is the founder of Yonder, a fast-growing Authentic Internet company on a mission to give the online world the same amount of authentic cultural context as the offline world. Using artificial intelligence, we help organizations identify the groups and narratives that drive conversation, revealing what matters and creating the confidence to act.

We hear “data breach” or “data leak” or “they’re gathering our data” and don’t stop to consider what that really means. We’ve accepted that there’s nothing really we can do about it anyway, so why fuss? 

“Does it really matter? Who cares! Well, I don’t have anything to hide.” We’ve all heard those statements, maybe even said them ourselves. But those are cop-outs. Ignorance can't be bliss forever.

So, now that we know what it means when we say “data” and how these companies make money from this data, let’s collectively pull our heads out of the sand for a few minutes and start to fully comprehend the amount of information that we’re giving away about ourselves.

Featured guests this episode:

Tim Shea is the founder and CEO of Latticework Insights. 

K Krasnow Waterman was the Chief Information Officer of the first post-9/11 data analytics facility established by the White House and, next, led the reorganization of the FBI's intelligence operations. She has held a multitude of roles across the government and business worlds, as well as being a Sloan Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

We seem to have collectively accepted that we’re going to keep playing this rigged game of data harvesting because the playing of the game itself placates us, giving us just enough of that beautiful dopamine-serotonin-oxytocin combo to get us to keep pulling the lever on the slot machine. 

There are thousands of entities that have thousands of pieces of data about you right now, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These same entities are selling that information to advertisers, political campaigns, and government agencies so that they can sell you what they want, make you believe what they want, or make you do what they want. 

So, being the reasonable people that we all are, don’t we want to know the truth about this game? The truth that defines our modern world? 

Featured guests this episode:

Judy Estrin is an Internet pioneer, entrepreneur, business executive, and author in the United States. Estrin worked with Vinton Cerf on the Transmission Control Protocol project at Stanford University in the 1970s, often looked at as the project that our modern e-mail emerged from. Estrin is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded eight technology companies. She was the chief technology officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000.

Estrin served on the boards of FedEx Corporation (1989-2010), Rockwell Automation (1994-1998), Sun Microsystems (1995-2003), as well as the being the first woman to serve on the board of Walt Disney Company, where she served for fifteen years (1998-2014). She served on the advisory boards of Stanford University School of Engineering and the Bio-X interdisciplinary program, and is a member of the University of California President’s Science and Innovation Advisory Board.

Tim Shea is the founder and CEO of Latticework Insights. 

Eric Sapp has managed successful democracy-building and advocacy campaigns on issues ranging from international peacekeeping, human rights, counterterrorism, and foreign assistance to domestic campaigns for pollution control, hunger alleviation, supporting veterans, and protecting victims of terrorism.  

Through these efforts, his team developed one of the largest voter response databases and most sophisticated digital advertising platforms in the country, which they transformed into a Public Benefit Corporation, Public Democracy.

Sarah Miller is Executive Director of the American Economic Liberties Project and formerly the Deputy Director of the Open Markets Institute.

Eric Yang is the Founder and Executive Director at Junto. Junto is a new breed of social media founded in the spirit of authenticity, with the goal of rebalancing our relationship with technology and inspiring agency, privacy, and free expression

We hear the words “they have your data,” or “they’re selling your data,” or “they’re keeping my data” and we think of it as some ethereal thing that has no merit to our lives. The results of this theft are hidden from us, and in many cases, on purpose.

This episode, I sat down with Tim Shea, a data scientist with a political background, to understand what it actually means when we say “they’re taking our data.” Then, I flew out to D.C. to speak to Bryan Lane, a data expert and senior government official, to learn more about how data is captured and indexed, and to start to hear about how it’s being used against our interests. 

Guests featured this episode:

Tim Shea - Tim is the founder and CEO of Latticework Insights. 

Bryan Lane - Bryan is the Director of Data and Artificial Intelligence at the General Services Administration.

Think about where we were technologically just 10 years ago, when everybody was really excited about our utopian tech-driven future.

Netflix used to mail you DVDs, now they spend $15 billion a year feeding their content algorithms. Google used to cutely offer you the “i’m feeling lucky” option, now they predict your searches before you finish typing them. Snapchat and Instagram didn’t exist yet, and Facebook was still a place where you could find someone under 45.

With modern smartphones, we have more technology in our pocket than what NASA had to send humans to the moon. We have more information at the tip of our fingers than all the libraries of the ancient world. We can make a few taps and gestures and food or drugs or people show up to where we are. 

But think about it. To the ancient world, we’d seem like a society of depressed wizards.

This week I speak again to Judy Estrin, Internet pioneer and serial entrepreneur to better understand how this problem has metastasized.

Then, I sit down with K Krasnow Waterman, who was the Chief Information Officer of the first post-9/11 data analytics facility established by the White House and, next, led the reorganization of the FBI's intelligence operations. K helped me form a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the problems we face. 

Have questions? Let us know on Instagram or Twitter!

Featured guests this episode:

Judy Estrin is an Internet pioneer, entrepreneur, business executive, and author in the United States. Estrin worked with Vinton Cerf on the Transmission Control Protocol project at Stanford University in the 1970s, often looked at as the project that our modern e-mail emerged from. Estrin is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded eight technology companies. She was the chief technology officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000.

Estrin served on the boards of FedEx Corporation (1989-2010), Rockwell Automation (1994-1998), Sun Microsystems (1995-2003), as well as the being the first woman to serve on the board of Walt Disney Company, where she served for fifteen years (1998-2014). She served on the advisory boards of Stanford University School of Engineering and the Bio-X interdisciplinary program, and is a member of the University of California President’s Science and Innovation Advisory Board.

K Krasnow Waterman

Early in her career, K was on the design team for a new IBM outsourced services and storage business; an officer of Morgan Guaranty Trust managing data centers and special technical projects; she then became a trial attorney and in-house legal advisor. K returned to her technology roots when she became inception CIO of the first post-9/11 task force created by President Bush, served as the interim chief operations executive for the reorganization of FBI Intelligence infrastructure, and represented the Department of Homeland Security in high level negotiations to set the requirements for interoperability of federal data systems.  More recently, she served as Global Head of Anti-Money Laundering Infrastructure at Citigroup.

Before Big Tech was the bad guy, we all had dreams of a digital utopia brought about by the democratizing power of the Internet.

What happened?

I spoke to Judy Estrin about her decades of experience as an innovator in Silicon Valley, and what she thinks might have happened to lead us astray.

Then, I sat down with Andrew Keen, one of the earliest Internet naysayers, to understand why he saw (and was willing to call out) such a big potential problem and when others did not.

Featured guests this episode:

Judy Estrin is an Internet pioneer, entrepreneur, business executive, and author in the United States. Estrin worked with Vinton Cerf on the Transmission Control Protocol project at Stanford University in the 1970s, often looked at as the project that our modern e-mail emerged from. Estrin is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded eight technology companies. She was the chief technology officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000.

Estrin served on the boards of FedEx Corporation (1989-2010), Rockwell Automation (1994-1998), Sun Microsystems (1995-2003), as well as the being the first woman to serve on the board of Walt Disney Company, where she served for fifteen years (1998-2014). She served on the advisory boards of Stanford University School of Engineering and the Bio-X interdisciplinary program, and is a member of the University of California President’s Science and Innovation Advisory Board.

Andrew Keen is a British-American entrepreneur and author.

In his book The Internet Is Not the Answer, Keen presents the history of the internet and its impact on psychology, economy, and society. He argues that the more the internet develops, the more detrimental it is to those who use it.

Keen writes: “It is more like a negative feedback loop, a digital vicious cycle in which it is us, the Web’s users, who are its victims rather than beneficiaries.” Keen goes on to argue that the internet has allowed for the emergence of “new, leviathan-like monopolists like Apple, Google, and Amazon,” impeding economic competition and economic justice between the rich and poor.

Follow him on Twitter here