The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [56]
Rendon had seen me talk about personalization at an event we both attended. Filter bubbles, he told me, provided new ways of managing perceptions. “It begins with getting inside the algorithm. If you could find a way to load your content up so that only your content gets pulled by the stalking algorithm, then you’d have a better chance of shaping belief sets,” he said. In fact, he suggested, if we looked in the right places, we might be able to see traces of this kind of thing happening now—sentiment being algorithmically shifted over time.
But if the filter bubble might make shifting perspectives easier in a future Iraq or Panama, Rendon was clearly concerned about the impact of self-sorting and personalized filtering for democracy at home. “If I’m taking a photo of a tree,” he said, “I need to know what season we’re in. Every season it looks different. It could be dying, or just losing its leaves in autumn.” To make good decisions, context is crucial—that’s why the military is so focused on what they call “360-degree situational awareness.” In the filter bubble, you don’t get 360 degrees—and you might not get more than one.
I returned to the question about using algorithms to shift sentiment. “How does someone game the system when it’s all about self-generated, self-reinforcing information flows? I have to think about it more,” Rendon said, “But I think I know how I’d do it.”
“How?” I asked.
He paused, then chuckled: “Nice try.” He’d already said too much.
The campaign of propaganda that Walter Lippmann railed against in World War I was a massive undertaking: To “goose-step the truth,” hundreds of newspapers nationwide had to be brought onboard. Now that every blogger is a publisher, the task seems nearly impossible. In 2010, Google chief Eric Schmidt echoed this sentiment, arguing in the journal Foreign Affairs that the Internet eclipses intermediaries and governments and empowers individuals to “consume, distribute, and create their own content without government control.”
It’s a convenient view for Google—if intermediaries are losing power, then the company’s merely a minor player in a much larger drama. But in practice, a great majority of online content reaches people through a small number of Web sites—Google foremost among them. These big companies represent new loci of power. And while their multinational character makes them resistant to some forms of regulation, they can also offer one-stop shopping for governments seeking to influence information flows.
As long as a database exists, it’s potentially accessible by the state. That’s why gun rights activists talk a lot about Alfred Flatow. Flatow was an Olympic gymnast and German Jew who in 1932 registered his gun in accordance with the laws of the waning Weimar Republic. In 1938, German police came to his door. They’d searched through the record, and in preparation for the Holocaust, they were rounding up Jews with handguns. Flatow was killed in a concentration camp in 1942.
For National Rifle Association members, the story is a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of a national gun registry. As a result of Flatow’s story and thousands like it, the NRA has successfully blocked a national gun registry for decades. If a fascistic anti-Semitic regime came into power in the United States, it’d be hard put to identify gun-holding Jews using its own databases.
But the NRA’s focus may have been too narrow. Fascists aren’t known for carefully following the letter of the law regarding extragovernmental databases. And using the data that credit card companies use—or for that matter, building models based on the thousands of data points Acxiom tracks—it’d be a simple matter to predict with significant accuracy who has a gun and who does not.
Even if you aren’t a gun advocate, the story is worth paying attention to. The dynamics of personalization