Dutch sociologist and Holocaust survivor Frederik Lodewijk Polak’s massive future studies text The Image of the Future
makes a bold statement about optimism and pessimism, creating four
categories of belief about the future, divided on two axes: things are
improving/worsening; and people can/can’t do something about the future.
From this taxonomy, Peter Hayward from Swinburne University created the
“Polak Game,” played in workshops to help participants clarify their
views about the future and where those views stem from, and what those
points of view erases, and what they elevate. The game was picked up by
CMU’s Stuart Candy, and spread to many other contexts, mutating as it
went, becoming a favorite at places like the Institute for the Future
(Jane McGonigal and Mark wrote about it in this IFTF report).
In a joint paper for the Journal of Future Studies, Hayward and Candy describe the game’s inception, uses, history and lessons.
I definitely belong in the bottom right quadrant: things are getting
worse, but it is in our power to do something about them. That’s
basically the premise of my novel Walkaway.
Apple just had a really poor Q3 earnings report, with hardware sales
falling off as people figure out that they just don’t need to get a new
phone every year or so; writing in Bloomberg, Leonid Bershidsky tries to
soothe investors by pointing out that Apple is still seeing growth in
“services” and that there’s plenty more growth to be realized there.
Bershidsky is refreshingly honest in his description of these services:
he refers to repairs, sales through the App and Itunes stores, and cloud
services as “collecting rent” on Apple customers and its suppliers.
As Bershidsky points out, long-term Apple users are rather locked into
its ecosystem by the tedious and potentially risky process of extracting
their photos, music, etc to a rival platform. That means that the
suppliers of things like music, ebooks, and videos are also locked into
Apple’s stores, unlikely to win a battle to establish rival stores that
interoperate with Apple’s Itunes and other apps, but which take a
smaller commission on the sale of their products. Apple has inserted
itself into the transactions for copyrighted works for the foreseeable
future, passively creaming off a substantial portion of the profits from
the sales not because their store is the best, but because they have
used DRM and other proprietary tactics to lock out competitors.
A Goldman Sachs report suggests that Apple aggressively turn the screw
on the rent-collecting end of its business, using bundling and
anti-competitive retail tactics to crush Dropbox and other cloud
providers currently serving Iphone owners.
The kicker to the piece comes in the final graf: “Rent extraction from a
user base that finds it hard to go away may sound a bit like extortion.
But it’s more honest and upfront than extracting data from users in
ways they often don’t understand and then making money off the data, as
Facebook does.”
The poverty of imagination on display here is maybe the most 2018 thing
I’ve read all year. Of course “If you’re not paying for the product,
you’re the product” – but as Bershidsky and Goldman Sachs agree, “even
if you pay for the product, you’re still the product.”
The fetishization of paid services as a panacea for the woes of
surveillance capitalism mistakes the nature of the problem. Google
doesn’t spy on us like crazy because they’re creepy spies: they spy on
us like crazy because the lack of competition lets their creepy
spy-nature run amok, and the size of Google and its surveillance
capitalism breathern allows it to purchase regulation and laws that fail
to meaningfully limit surveilling us (if we were serious about
regulating privacy, we’d create really serious statutory damages for breaches, far beyond even the dreams of Ron Wyden).
(To say nothing of the other problem with “everything should be a paid
service”: in a grossly unequal world, the idea that charging to
participate in discourse will fix discourse is radioactively wrong, a
bad idea that’s visible from orbit – imagine a world where the vast
majority either have to ration their participation, or use platforms
subsidized by 1-percenters who reserve the right to kick you off their
services for suggesting limits on looting and exploitation)
What if, instead of forcing us to choose between monopoly surveillance
capitalism and monopoly walled-garden capitalism, we held out hope for a
world where we smashed the monopolies. Made them paid their taxes, made
them divest of the competitors they gobbled up, cut them down to a size
where they could no longer dominate the legislative and regulatory
processes.
Because, after all, even with its weak growth figures, Apple is still a vastly
profitable company. Being forced to give up on blocking competing
stores, service, parts, and add-ons would not put the company out of
business: it would merely shave a few points off the its quarterly
profits – while diverting that income to other companies, from the
small mom-and-pop service depot on your corner to the indie app vendor
who could sell software to Ios users direct and pocket the 30% Apple
would have creamed off of their margin.
The future is not a choice between one kind of monopoly and another:
it’s a choice between monopoly and anti-monopoly. The choice between
surveillance and walled gardens is no choice at all (and, in the case of
Facebook, you get two horrors for the price of one).
