The internet faced its own disruption in 2020. After thirty years, the waves of wonder and euphoria that had welcomed network technology into every cranny of our lives were beginning to ebb. A growing awareness of what Shoshana Zuboff had dubbed ‘surveillance capitalism’ placed a new focus on the once-iconic social media giants Google and Facebook, and their increasingly malign societal impact. Even the father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, conceded his child had lost its way. Presidential candidates were calling for the break-up of the behemoths, while even conservative governments like Australia’s were taking steps to regulate the platforms. It was now or never, and we were ready to roll. But just as the citadels of Big Tech prepared to confront their Waterloo, the global pandemic came along and our best-laid plans went into lockdown.
The first thing to strike me about the COVID-19 pandemic was how poorly equipped the social media platforms were to anchor a public conversation when it really mattered. The algorithms that retrofitted our newsfeed to our observed desires seemed impotent when we needed to know the truth. Rather than helping us to feel informed, Facebook exuded a discombobulating, cloying stream of anxiety and home-cooked meals. Twitter was all shrill alarmism and angry finger-pointing. I assume TikToks were still ironic and Instagram still narcissistic and LinkedIn now, truly, irrelevant. None of them seemed equipped to fulfil a role of informing and mobilising a common response to a critical public health crisis. Indeed, mental health experts warned us to cut back our social media use if we didn’t want to lose our minds.
Digging deeper, researchers at Queensland University of Technology, led by Axel Bruns and Tim Graham, found that the platforms were actively feeding disinformation, propagating conspiracy theories that would become presidential talking points in the weeks to come. Analysing Twitter hashtags, they identified coordinated dispersion of the Wuhan bioweapon theory and charted the spread of the confected 5G connection. They found clusters linked to MAGA, QAnon and right-wing populists retweeting within seconds of being posted, indicating dissemination by bots rather than people. They charted how the theories would bubble around Twitter before being picked up by Facebook influencers, celebrity super-spreaders, fringe news sites, until they would appear in traditional media. Like the virus itself, disinformation builds slowly into an infectious outbreak, contributing to the mind-numbing loss of life over which Donald Trump is now presiding.
In contrast, as the crisis deepened, trust in traditional media soared. Our Guardian Essential Report noted a sharp uptake in the numbers of people saying they trusted traditional media. Yet as the importance of traditional media was underlined, the industry itself was in crisis. Readership of news sites went through the roof—at Guardian Australia, readership doubled to over 11 million a month—but advertising revenue fell 20 per cent. A swathe of local papers ceased publication through the lockdown and likely beyond. Advertising revenue, already parlous, was predicted to dive further, with Fairfax’s weekend papers underwritten by cruise adverts targeting wealthy superannuants particularly. Buzzfeed Australia, one of the success stories of digital media, closed its Australian news outpost.
This professional success with parallel commercial failure highlights the urgency of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Digital Platforms Inquiry, whose report was released in 2019. A serious attempt to come to terms with the impact of social platforms on media revenue, the ACCC recommended world-leading reform, in which Google and Facebook would be required to pay for the news stories that provide so much of the content that keeps users glued to their streams. The government fell short of embracing the full ACCC recommendations, but at the behest of News Corp found sufficient backbone to flag a mandatory revenue-sharing code.
As we move out of lockdown, the government would do well to return to the original report and dust off some of the benched proposals, such as limiting Big Tech acquisitions of competitors, enforceable takedown orders for breaches of copyright, and a legally enforceable code to combat disinformation and signal credible sources.
Lockdown Lesson #1: A functioning media is not a nice thing to have, it is part of our social fabric. And Facebook is not a functioning part of the media.
Confined to home, we became more reliant on technology than ever. Those of us lucky enough to keep our jobs hacked new ways to work in isolation, while those whose careers were put on hold sought solace in connection. As long as Malcolm Turnbull’s NBN held up (and, thankfully, it mostly did), we would not be alone. Many adapted videoconferencing technologies that had been quietly rolling into workplaces to their daily lives. Zoom was a reasonably new but delightfully structured platform that could house intimate face-to-face meetings for anything from two to 1000 people.
My business’s Sydney and Melbourne offices collapsed into a single team as we checked in each morning, the comms and research practitioners I employ swapping skills as we worked through how to deliver remotely. After-work drinks became impromptu trivia contests as teams were broken into ‘rooms’ and fed a stream of questions on Slack. My cricket team resolved to catch up for a weekly Zoom and check in on each other, setting ourselves YouTube homework, sharing our passion and rekindling it through a genuine social network.
Acting on a hunch that this was a new form of connection, I started running large-scale lunchtime talks over the platform. ‘Australia at Home’ featured a panel of speakers each day who shared ideas with an audience that was invited to jump into the chat and ask their questions directly. We soon learned that the intimate nature of inviting everyone into a single online space where they would allow the camera into their own home created a shared sense of purpose that was mutually reinforcing. Unlike a Facebook Live event or a podcast, we were no longer consumers of content but part of the event: the energy of screens and screens of faces became the moment.
Organisations I worked for wanted to replicate the experience: 300 doctors asking questions directly to the health minister, 850 aged-care CEOs with direct access to the chief medical officer, information sessions for people on the NDIS, council town halls, constituent meetings, Billy Bragg on May Day playing ‘Solidarity Forever’ from his lounge room. There was something uniquely democratic about these experiences—everyone on screen, able to step up to the plate, carrying on their own parallel discussions in the chat.
Unlike the old platforms, these relationships were not premised on the exchange of personal information for future exploitation. Zoom was far closer to a platform of co-creation, where one didn’t click or scroll or like but actually participated. And while the old players sent up flares about security and privacy, each time they did Zoom responded, itself a work in progress.
With this intensity of real connection also came the need for time off. The Zoom experience was draining: from meeting to meeting with no need to travel from site to site, we were constantly on. But the rhythm of this connection was different. Intense co-creation was followed by a return to the real world, to walk the dog or shoot a basket with the boy. And because the platform did not have a business model premised on keeping one on-screen for longer, there were no behavioural psychologists poring over our usage and the sites we had visited, or emails we had written, in order to enhance our engagement and prolong our time online to produce more of their precious data. We were free to leave when it was all over.
My Zoom experience reminded me of the work of Yochai Benkler, whom I had come across while researching my 2019 book Webtopia and trying to get my head around an alternative way of using technology where people regained human agency. His influential The Wealth of Networks had envisaged the web driving what he called ‘commons-based peer production’—decentralised, collaborative, non-commercial activity that generated its own energy. These digital commons inspired some of the best things on the web: open-source coding, the creation of Wikipedia, and collaborative artistic projects. Now we were all occupying the commons.
Lockdown Lesson #2: When we really needed to connect, we connected with each other, not with technology.
As we emerge from the lockdown, our little steps back to normality will be also facilitated by network technology. Governments around the world have placed tracking apps as a core tool in charting the inevitable virus outbreaks that will follow the relaxing of social distancing for the sake of economic viability. The apps will capture every interaction over a set period of time, holding a record on our phones for the two-week infection period. What is being collected is a digital log of an individual’s every human interaction—technology that in normal circumstances would be untenable in a liberal democracy.
Australian digital rights activists have been naturally wary of the COVIDSafe app, having seen how the public safety response to the 9/11 attacks led to the monitoring of web usage that was the genesis of surveillance capitalism. Technology developed in crises becomes the norm and so we need to be careful where we take this. The idea of personal tracking seems a short cut to the sorts of data troves that would serve the Chinese Government and Mark Zuckerberg in equal measure. The more we know, the more we can control.
But something different and interesting happened this time around. Because the government needed public take-up to open the economy, it was prepared to listen to concerns and provide enforceable safeguards. Over weeks of iteration, the prime minister made it clear the app would not be mandatory, the data would be destroyed in a defined time, the source code would be public and the data would not be handed over to national security. While there is justifiable scepticism about whether the thing will actually work, for once there is no privacy hill to die on.
A broader question arises from this: if the government can work to this level of collaboration with the public over the introduction of this technology, why can’t it ensure all new technology is introduced in a similar fashion? For the past twenty years the internet has treated the laws of the land as irrelevant; it has celebrated disruption of industries and asserted its right to destroy norms. The livelihood of workers has been collateral damage. But this moment shows a different course, where change is explained and negotiated, giving the public a real stake in the outcome.
While this very public negotiation has been going on, a separate and even more profound consultation is underway, driven by Human Rights Commissioner Ed Santow. He is arguing that artificial intelligence (AI) needs to have similar scrutiny to the COVIDSafe app before it can be implemented in Australia. In particular, he argues that AI that operates in Australia should comply with Australian human rights laws, that automated decisions should be explainable, and, critically, that there should be a moratorium on the use of facial recognition technology in law enforcement until we get this right.
There are enormous upsides to this approach. For starters, it will ensure that technology with the potential to alter lives is robustly tested by someone other than companies out to make a buck. But more profoundly, it embeds Australian values of fairness in a way that could contrast to the repression of Chinese AI or the rapaciousness of American AI, planting the seeds of a compelling Australian-made technology to export to the world.
Lockdown Lesson #3: The most effective technology is negotiated through society, not imposed on it.
There are valid concerns that Big Tech will continue to thrive as we emerge on the other side. A world where work and play and home and family merge is fertile ground for companies to render and repackage the data we generate to transform us into something less than human. But the Big Tech models that dominated our pre-pandemic world are open to challenge, and we have the chance to define a new normal.
The secret behind Big Tech’s dominance is that it is reliant on our compliance. If we decide that Facebook won’t be our home base if it doesn’t pay for news, then Facebook is not as strong. If we decide to support a local store rather than go straight to Amazon, then Amazon is weaker. If we switch off our devices when the Zoom meeting is over and come up for air, then the whole network of networks has a little less oxygen. We can choose not to sign up to sites that are not up-front about how they use our data, and we can take an interest in whether companies are monitoring their workers with a view to replacing them down the line. We can even demand that our super funds exert our power as investors to support companies that accord with our values.
We can ask similar questions of governments, too. Will they use citizens’ information against them, like the travesty of robodebt, or track reporters when they write a story that embarrasses the government? Will they have the will to stand up to the intense lobbying of the world’s largest companies and demand they play by the same rules as everyone else? Will they invest in independent media, even if it makes their life a little less comfortable? Will they stand up for the workers and industries that already exist, or snort the fairy dust of the techtopians? The moment enough of us demand they do these things, it will no longer be risky or radical to act in our interests; all of a sudden, it will be good politics.
Finally, we need to ask these same questions as activists of the organisations we inhabit. The way we use technology is a moral statement: progressives need to fight a just war, even when the other side doesn’t. ‘Mediscare’ was justification for ‘death tax’, feeding the downward spiral, and while we can tell it was ‘truthy’ enough, we know deep down it was a stretch. More fundamentally, it’s time to question the compulsion to build data lists to ping tailored messages to campaign targets, as if that’s the new political engagement. Too many political campaigners have become more like marketing managers, looking for truth in data that just isn’t there.
And the sting is that, while playing the game on these social media platforms, we keep losing. For a few years there was a myth that social media was a progressive platform, because of ‘Obama’. But Obama was never a reason: he was a once-in-a-generation politician. We have seen in campaign after campaign how micro-targeting and tailoring messages to the individual works far better for conservatives than progressives. Social media is driven by anger and outrage, which fuels disengagement and cynicism, which are the natural friends of reactionaries. Making the political a consumer experience seems to me a fool’s errand.
But damn, using technology to inform people, engage people and give them a real stake in how things move forward? That’s the sort of environment where the fantastic ideas in this book could really take root and grow and bear fruit—maybe not tomorrow, but in the seasons to come. Because I have a theory that has become clearer through the lockdown: people have responded in this moment of crisis because they have felt more fully human. After years of being reduced to a segmented ‘type’, we have refound ourselves, and I don’t think this will be easily unlearned.
Lockdown Lesson #4: Let’s not let the great disruption go to waste.