Words Betray Us

"Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

– George Orwell Politics and the English Language

This weeks essay by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders on "AI and the Evolution of Social Media" made interesting reading. It extrapolates on current problems caused by BigTech social media as it acquires AI technology. It anticipates how advertising, surveillance, virality, lock-in and monopolisation will all be amplified by "AI". These points I agree with. Yet for some reason it stopped short of something and left me feeling unsatiated.

Frustratingly, the tone of the essay gets close to naming certain important concepts that are in the air. They seem obvious to most folks. They confront us every day. They are things we frequently delve into on The Cybershow (apparently with some of the colour of George Carlin). That is to say, as Orwell advised, we go for simple words and familiar human concepts wherever a neologism can be avoided.

Likewise with Cory Doctorow's wonderful coining of "enshitification", I feel despite a very clever, cogent explanation of the state of digital commerce today, my tongue is left pining for the taste of something that's suggested on the menu but never brought to the table. And again, with Shoshana Zuboff's "surveillance capitalism", her haste to paint a terrifying new world leaves out something obvious, old and plain as the rocks and sky.

What is missing in Schneier and Sanders' account is the word abuse. Just as drugs can be abused despite offering great potential benefits, so can technology. Each of the social problems described in his list is really a simple abuse. Perhaps Tristan Harris is the among the few able to so boldly call out what is inhumane.

Abuse occurs within power relationships. It need not be criminal, technically. Indeed most of what Schneier and Sanders describe is accepted, legitimised or at least normalised. That does not make it any less abusive.

For example techniques using AI-powered ads are said to "border on the manipulative" and later the authors raise the "possibility of manipulation". This feels unnecessarily timid. Edward Bernays expressly transformed modern advertising into out-and-out manipulation 100 years ago. There is little debate about that, at least amongst advertisers. Choosing not to identify abusive manipulation lends a tone of harmlessness that I think we have all moved beyond. The landscape of adblockers and 'forced content' is hard to describe as anything but a "war between advertisers and consumers" for control of personal devices.

"Never use the passive where you can use the active."

– George Orwell Politics and the English Language

The word missing from Doctorow's treatise on "enshitification" is betrayal. Putting aside who is sold to whom, and when, the overarching crime is betrayal. When the switcheroo happens, when the business 'pivots' and the customer is sold out, nothing more than age-old treachery is afoot. A company is reneging on carefully cultivated expectations and promises. It is cashing-in the accumulated capital of trust.

Enshitification describes a process not an action. It's passivity cloaks human intent and behaviour in a mist. It is like shrugging that John Lennon "fell victim to the forces of jealousy and madness" rather than that he was murdered by a deranged Mark Chapman. As such it paints immoral acts committed by people against other people as inevitable side effects of presumed progress or ideology.

In Zuboff's account, where are the words coercion and blackmail? Spying on people and then using their secrets to manipulate them are ancient crafts for which we already have reliable terms. Let us not launder powerful and timeless concepts when speaking about multi-billion dollar US companies.

"Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

– George Orwell Politics and the English Language

My frustration then with fellow writers like Schneier, Doctorow and Zuboff is that while trying to speak to a broad and ordinary audience they miss some crucial element of direct, salt speech so desperately needed.

I cannot get my students, family or friends to talk comfortably about enshitification or surveillance capitalism. But they'll readily agree that our biggest tech companies are "gangsters" in the business of abuse, betrayal and coercion, and it's time those of us involved in intelligent technological critique stopped pulling punches when talking about that.

It does not "make us sound like nutcases and Luddites" to robustly challenge the abuse of technology with plain talk. It makes us defenders and champions of humane technology. Culture has already turned that corner and we are well into the long, popular struggle for "technology for the people".

A little more plain talk around betrayal, abuse and coercion will help us see how much worse things will get once they're amplified by "AI" technologies adept at fooling us to gain trust.

Martha James for her thoughts on sincerity and commitment to truthful communication.