Hwang is a Berkeley Law School graduate who has worked at Google, led a Harvard-MIT project to study the ethical applications of machine learning, and cofounded a boutique law firm “for the extremely online.”

Subprime explains how computer science helped advertising turn human attention into a commodity. Commodification involves grouping massive numbers of similar items into packets of value which can be computer traded at high speed. Mortgages to buy homes, pork bellies to make bacon, oranges for juice concentrate, any product with a large enough market can be packaged into units and traded as a commodity.

The internet should have been the ultimate human tool. Instead, programmatic advertising has turned our attention into a commodity.

Internet technology commodified attention by gathering personal information about every person and linking that knowledge to every bit of content they view. Through a technology called programmatic advertising, when a person clicks on a website, their demographic and psychographic characteristics are broadcast to advertisers who can bid to place commercial messages alongside whatever content that consumer is visiting.

Consider how this might have worked had I searched for a last-minute restaurant reservation after listening to Klein’s podcast on Valentine’s Day. My query would have generated a signal: 68-year-old cisgender male has attention available. Advertising messages are matched to buyer-specific attention opportunities in the time it takes for the search results to load. Erectile dysfunction meds might have topped the bids had I searched sooner, but at-home flower delivery seemed the better bet given the lateness of the hour. That’s programmatic advertising.

Hwang drew the subprime aspect of the title from his concern that the temptation to fake attention metrics might collapse the internet’s economic foundation much as mortgage fraud brought down commoditized debt and the U.S. economy. Metric inflation is so common that the TV series Silicon Valley included a humorous bit about a startup that hires a click farm to fake exponential attention growth for a buggy product.

Klein used his podcast to explore how programmatic advertising affects what sorts of information flow online. The internet siphoned off ad revenues that had once supported many newspapers, broadcasters, and other pre-internet info vendors. Some name-brand info merchants have survived by shifting to subscription sales. Klein said internet flows are boiling down to a question of what people are willing to pay for.

I care about small producers. Local authors, musicians, artists, filmmakers, game designers, and other content creators bring a hitherto unimaginable diversity of voices to the marketplace of ideas. But programmatic advertising rarely works for them. They can’t generate enough attention. For every internet influencer who goes viral, tens of thousands labor in obscurity. As for selling subscriptions, small content creators have the business model of a kid’s lemonade stand, selling to family and friends and hoping for recommendations.

At one point Klein says the character of the internet flows from its business model. He’s both wrong and right. The internet was an engineering cooperative, a functioning anarchy with no central point of control. Its technical protocols were designed to empower the creative people at the edges of the network. It should have been the ultimate human tool. Instead, programmatic advertising has turned our attention into a commodity. Surely that is a character flaw.

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At the same time, demographic, socioeconomic, and political phenomena coalesced to rob journalism of its superpowers – defining the public agenda and moderating civil discourse. In the 1920s political scientists had called this gatekeeper theory: media couldn’t tell people how to think, but media could tell them what to think about. This was still true as late as 1981 when television journalist Walter Cronkite closed his final CBS Evening News show with his tagline, “And that’s the way it is.” Even then, millions of Americans believed that a 30-minute telecast could encapsulate the vital affairs of a nation.

Traditional journalists must evolve new watchdog roles. Today they are obsessed with politics.

No more. Alternative news platforms arose to challenge the local newspapers and broadcasters that once enjoyed Cronkite-like authority in their cities or states. These organizations had become synonymous with the brand of journalism in which I was trained. But many consumers started getting their news from fair and balanced gatekeepers offering alternative public agendas. The century-old gatekeeper theory was being revised in real-time. Media could no longer tell all of the people, all of the time, what to think about. With multiple agendas, everyone could decide that other people were being fooled some of the time or most of the time

The convergence of these trends dumbfounded practitioners and consumers of journalism descended from Cronkite. Their process operates at a competitive disadvantage in the Attention Economy. It takes time to discover facts and test their truthfulness. But each piece of content has infinitesimal value. The faster it gets to market the sooner it can start gathering an audience of sufficient size to justify the effort of producing it. Accuracy counts for less than speed. That isn’t new. Long before the days of yellow journalism, it was said that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can pull its boots on. Social media simply accelerated the pace and lowered the bar. Why put on boots? Just run out naked and start screaming for attention.

To counteract the hysterical advantage of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy, traditional journalists must evolve new watchdog roles. Today they are obsessed with politics. They patrol national and state capitols, city halls, school boards, police departments, and a myriad of settings of potential political conflicts. These are not to ignored. They involve issues of taxation and public expenditures, public safety and personal rights, justice and hatred, and other problems beyond individual or private resolution. But political disagreements often arise from beliefs and values so deeply rooted in personal circumstances as to be unshakeable. In an era of declining trust, how much should we spend on the next political story when our stock in trade, the facts, are unlikely to change minds?

To be more effective watchdogs, journalists should start covering more phenomena outside the governmental, political, and cultural realms. Decisions that affect our lives are made every day by scientific, engineering, industrial, regulatory, public health, and a myriad of other quasi-public deliberative bodies.

We must devise ways to understand, simplify, and report back on their doings if we expect people to have any control over vast aspects of their lives. Now, these entities labor in obscurity until something like a pandemic breaks out. Suddenly, a field like public health goes from being ignored to misunderstood in a matter of days. Complex issues become politicized before journalists have time to create broad public awareness and acceptance of facts. Their barking lets you track the burglar going room-to-room. The more trustworthy and valuable watchdog would have let out a howl before the thief was in the house.

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They used a tiny saw with a diamond wire to slice a pearl into cross sections, which they examined with microscopes as we might study the rings of a tree felled with a chainsaw. They discovered that layers of nacre had been laid down in various thicknesses, more here, less there, until the jagged irritant was encased in a smooth sphere. “In one example the (scientists) counted 2,615 layers in a pearl, which were deposited over 548 days,” wrote journalist Rachel Crowell, summarizing the study in the December 4th, 2021, edition of Science News.

Scientists still don’t know how or why billions of molecules worked together to complete the task. But they learned that the variations in the thickness of the layers followed a pattern common to many biological and natural phenomena, from the regular behavior of brain waves to the rumblings of ordinary underground seismic activity. Moderate actions toward stability appear to be how nature maintains and repairs itself, while herky-jerky bursts are associated with epileptic seizures and earthquakes.

People often liken politics to a pendulum that swings steadily back and forth. That’s the theoretical ideal of democracy: if we trust and respect one another’s judgments, the rough edges will be smoothed over even if we can’t see how. But humans are more complicated than oysters. We aren’t mechanisms. We have minds of our own and when we get irritated, our emotions can cloud our judgments and tarnish our ideals. So, it’s better to think of politics as a game of seesaws because it takes cooperation to maintain a rough balance. There’s always a risk that playground bullies might scooch back to their end to hold up the other end until the kicking and screaming attracts enough weight to tilt the balance. Then what? Does cooperation resume, or does the game get uglier?

I write after an unusually anxious American election and though it’s not clear whether the seesaw will tilt right or left, the vote seems to have swung toward balance. On the eve of the election, I spoke with a woman who was not the least bit apprehensive about the outcome. “When we stay engaged, that’s all that can be asked of us,” she said, adding with pearl-like wisdom, “And do it from love.”

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Ironically, The Cloud’s consumer monopolies are built on the graves of two technological monopolies.

This is anti-competitive behavior, and we have every right to protest because The Cloud traces its existence to the taxpayer-funded research that developed the internet. That research began in the late 1960s and early ‘70s when U.S. leaders wanted a communications system that could survive a nuclear first strike and enable them to launch a counterattack. In the ‘90s, then-Senator Al Gore and President George H.W. Bush put this thankfully unused military network on a civilian track. With bipartisan support, they funded the academic computer scientists who built what became the backbone of the internet. Two public sector scientists made vital contributions. European computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee devised a system of www.whatever.com addresses – virtual locations where text, video, and other digital content could be pulled together in one place. U.S. computer scientist turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen developed a browser to take users to these web addresses. It is by leveraging these taxpayer-funded technologies that The Cloud enables consumers to order products made in China and get them home-delivered the same day.

Ironically, The Cloud’s consumer monopolies are built on the graves of two technological monopolies. The first was the old-fashioned telephone system. It was a tangle of wires plugged into switchboards. Those switchboards connected the senders’ wire to the receivers’ phones and vice versa. These switchboards also served as the toll booths where the phone company could extract its monopoly rents. The internet never had switchboards or toll booths. The absence of centralized control points was the genius behind its survivability. Internet technology allowed information traffic to find its way around chokepoints or breaks in the network so that senders and receivers could always communicate.

The mainframe computer was the second monopoly that had to perish so The Cloud could form. In the mainframe era, a person or business needing data processing submitted a work order and waited for one of these relatively rare machines to perform the task. In the ’70s and ’80s, personal computer applications like spreadsheets and word processing began to reduce reliance on the mainframe. By the ’90s, desktop computers had evolved into powerful workstations because they could process more data when connected via electronic networks. In those open frontier days of the internet, software and hardware entrepreneurs were free to create thousands of network-based computer apps that enabled millions of businesses and professionals to make products and deliver services faster and more cheaply.

During this era of technological innovation, spurred by the death of monopolies, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to deregulate the information industry. Congress acted in the bipartisan belief that in the New Economy, technological competition would prevent the monopolies that had led to the antitrust laws of the Industrial Economy.

But today, we live in a Consumer Economy. Nearly 70% of the Gross Domestic Product involves buying or selling goods or services rather than making things. So even big, established brick-and-mortar firms find it tough to compete with The Cloud. Small, tech-savvy businesspeople know they can’t beat The Cloud, so many join it by renting “storefronts” from cloud companies that create virtual malls where consumers congregate. But in addition to paying monopoly rents, these subservient sellers must accept whatever terms and conditions The Cloud imposes to reach consumers on the public network. Contrast that with the pre-cloud internet. It had no terms and conditions, only technical protocols for how to plug in a new device or test a novel app. Innovation flourished because anyone could try a notion, quit if it flopped, improve it if it showed promise, and even make big money if the idea proved useful or popular.

Today we need another jolt of the freewheeling innovation that the internet was built to allow. Business license applications are soaring as millions of Americans either leave or lose traditional jobs and go it alone. Their ingenuity and sweat equity could and should transform eCommerce and eServices – once we reboot the internet and restore the open access built into its technology. I’m not alone in this belief. There are folks out there now developing open technologies and business practices. As a writer and small businessperson, I’d like to help these folks pool their efforts toward retooling our public network to help businesses grow from the ground up.

Thank you for your attention. Please share this where it makes sense, and/or use the contact box at the left to get in touch.

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