Anil Dash

“ Most of the people building these features at these companies don’t mean to undermine markets. The coders and designers at companies like Uber and Facebook and all the others are usually well-intentioned and genuinely see their work as benefiting users. In the immediate term, they’re not even wrong; being able to easily hail a cab or quickly read a story is a real benefit. But most tech workers, including at the biggest tech companies, are blind to the radical political and social agendas of their companies’ owners and investors. ”

“ It’s not inevitable that we have to give over our open markets to new Fake Markets dominated by one or two giant tech companies. And perhaps the single biggest thing we can do is both the hardest and the easiest: We can change our own behaviors. ”

“ This shift to rigged markets was perfected in the app stores, where the major players like Apple and Google choose which apps get featured and promoted, and prevent the creation of any apps that would displace or threaten their market dominance. Even if an app does succeed, the app stores promote an ad-supported model that makes app creators dependent on the tech company’s platform for distribution, instead of an app deriving revenues directly from its users. ”

“ But even in these fake markets, there are currently multiple providers offering their services within the ecosystem. The providers are those Uber drivers or Facebook publishers being lauded as independent entrepreneurs thriving on the platform.
But Uber has already plainly announced its roadmap: Self-driving cars. The much-lauded independent driver-entrepreneurs will be replaced by completely automated service providers as quickly as possible, and not only will those new self-driving cars not have drivers who need to be paid, they will all be owned by Uber itself. ”

“ And passengers can’t make informed choices about selecting a driver: The algorithm by which a passenger and driver are matched is opaque—to both the passenger and driver. In fact, as Data & Society’s research has shown, Uber has at times deliberately misrepresented the market of available cars by showing “ghost” cars to users in the Uber app.
It seems this “market” has some awfully weird traits.
Consumers can’t trust the information they’re being provided to make a purchasing decision. ”

“ The rise of rigged markets The inevitable automated gaming of the early open digital markets inadvertently catalyzed the start of the next era: rigged markets. Google got concerned about nefarious search engine optimization tricks, and kept changing their algorithm, meaning that pretty soon the only web publishers that could thrive were those who could afford to keep tweaking their technology to keep up in this new arms race. ”

“ We’re hooked on the temporary infusion of venture capital dollars into vulnerable markets that we know are about to be remade by technological transformation and automation. The only social force empowered to anticipate or prevent these disruptions are policymakers who are often too illiterate to understand how these technologies work, and who too desperately want the halo of appearing to be associated with “high tech”, the secular religion of America. ”

“ These pseudo-market patterns also mask patterns of subsidy, like the fact that Uber’s current operations are subsidized by investors to the tune of $2 billion per year. That’s a cost that will be immediately passed along to consumers as soon as Uber succeeds in displacing conventional taxis. ”

“ For example, we can sincerely laud Uber for making it easier for African American passengers to reliably hail a car when they need a ride, but if persistent patterns of bias from drivers arise again in the Uber era, we’ll have a harder time regulating those abuses because Uber doesn’t usually follow the same policies as licensed taxis. ”

“ But the technical mechanism by which Facebook and Google provide that faster reading experience happens to incidentally displace most of the third-party advertising platforms — the ones that aren’t provided by Facebook and Google themselves. Facebook publishers who use these new distribution channels are incentivized to use Facebook’s advertising platform, where payment rates and profit margins can be unilaterally changed at any time. ”

“ When this transition happens over the next decade, we’ll have entire markets of independent contractors displaced by the transition, precisely at the point when the social safety net is being dismantled. In the meantime, politicians across the political spectrum have been presenting these “gig economy” non-jobs as the future of work.
Self-driving cars are hard, though. Making a robot that can navigate through a city and deliver a passenger safely and reliably to their destination is an incredibly hard problem that will take a long time to get exactly right. ”

“ We’ve already seen that a lot of news consumers aren’t interested in being safely and reliably delivered to accurate news. Success in this case will be much easier: A robotic publisher only has to deliver content that’s emotionally engaging enough to earn a person’s readership for a few moments. That’s even easier to do if the publisher or distributor of the content doesn’t care if the story is true or not. Peter Thiel is on Facebook’s board of directors. ”

“ And remember, Facebook tends to subsidize publishers taking advantage of its new platform features just until the point at which those publishers become dependent on them. Publishers are already struggling with overall media industry economics; Facebook’s promised payouts may be an offer they don’t feel like they can refuse. ”

“ That’s not to say these systems are fair: the big companies can pick which players in the market get to compete, and issues of network inequality mean people or companies that are privileged enough to be early adopters get unfair advantages. ”

“ It’s essential we develop a vocabulary for talking about these issues, and perhaps the single most effective action we can take is to educate our elected officials about the changes that are happening. ”

“ This stuff is complex, and it’s going to take time to teach all our representatives about why all the changes wrought by these new high-tech apps aren’t necessarily the best thing for our communities in the long term. ”