{"id":786,"date":"2021-08-09T05:56:06","date_gmt":"2021-08-09T05:56:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systemerrorbook.com\/?page_id=786"},"modified":"2021-09-08T00:15:50","modified_gmt":"2021-09-08T00:15:50","slug":"excerpt","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/systemerrorbook.com\/excerpt\/","title":{"rendered":"Excerpt"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
After decades of innovation by computer and internet companies unfettered by government regulation, Americans are enjoying the benefits provided by Big Tech\u2014but also contending daily with problems that the industry has ushered in. Even consumers who love their smartphones and Instagram accounts may be concerned about how they siphon up personal data and lure users back with every new alert. While tech platforms help keep people in contact with family and friends, they also rely on opaque algorithms that shape the content we see. Seeing these dynamics, many politicians appear uncertain whether to get cozy with the visionary leaders of Google, Apple, and Facebook\u2014or to campaign against the pollution of the American information ecosystem, the amplification of hate speech and harassment, and the striking concentration of market power among a small number of companies.<\/span><\/h5>\n
Please read the rest of this adapted excerpt in The Atlantic<\/a><\/strong>.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
Joshua Browder entered Stanford as a young, brilliant undergraduate in 2015. His Wikipedia page describes him as a \u201cBritish- American entrepreneur,\u201d and he\u2019s already been named to Forbes magazine\u2019s \u201c30 Under 30\u201d list. As a freshman at Stanford\u2014after no more than three months there, he says\u2014he programmed a chatbot to help people overturn their parking tickets. He\u2019d thought of the start-up when he was living in the United Kingdom before college: \u201cI got thirty parking tickets in the UK when I was in high school at about eighteen years old, the driving age. I couldn\u2019t pay for any of the tickets. I probably deserved them, but because I couldn\u2019t afford them, I created software for myself and my friends to get out of them.\u201d Seems simple enough for a side project during your first year of college, but of course Browder discovered that \u201ceveryone in the world hates parking tickets.\u201d<\/span><\/h6>\n
Fast-forward a few years, and Browder was on leave from Stanford as the CEO of a tech company called DoNotPay, which provides a free and automated mechanism for challenging parking tickets issued in big cities, including London and New York. According to a glowing profile of his work, as of June 2016, the company had successfully challenged more than 160,000 parking tickets, sparing people $4 million.<\/span><\/h6>\n
The service is pretty straightforward. Browder worked with a group of pro bono traffic lawyers to identify the most common reasons for parking tickets to be overturned. A chatbot asks users a few questions that enables it to make a judgment about whether the user can file an effective appeal. The chatbot then guides the user through the process of filing an appeal, at no charge. The chatbot has little capacity to determine whether a ticket was issued legitimately or not; it simply provides the user with the optimal grievance procedure. Obviously, users are thrilled to get out of paying annoying and often expensive parking tickets, and the only people who lose are lawyers and the government. In Browder\u2019s words, \u201cparking tickets are a sort of tax on the vulnerable. It\u2019s so wrong that the government is taxing the group they should be protecting.\u201d Browder has accordingly been celebrated as a \u201cwunderkind\u201d in magazines and websites such as Wired, Business Insider, and Newsweek, as well as at Stanford itself. And he\u2019s secured the support of one of Silicon Valley\u2019s most successful venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz, which led the seed round of funding for Browder\u2019s company in 2017.<\/span><\/h6>\n
But this is exactly the type of story\u2014and there are hundreds of them at Stanford and in Silicon Valley\u2014that gives us pause. From our perspective, it\u2019s essential to reflect on why parking tickets exist in the first place. Annoying as they might be, they serve many important, legitimate purposes.<\/span><\/h6>\n
They deter people from parking by fire hydrants, blocking driveways, or occupying spaces reserved for the disabled. In large cities, they motivate people to move their cars for street cleaners. Enhanced parking enforcement can also be used to achieve broader community priorities, such as reducing traffic and congestion. And parking tickets constitute a meaningful source of municipal revenue necessary to support a city and its citizens.<\/span><\/h6>\n
Browder may have been responding to a zeitgeist in the conservative London tabloids that slammed local governments\u2019 efforts to raise revenues through parking tickets, something that coincided with other city initiatives to reduce traffic and congestion for reasons of both convenience and environmental health. But reducing traffic is something that a lot of people just might value. In London, local councils must spend the revenue from parking tickets on local transport projects, including the 9 billion backlog in national road repairs. Infrastructure is a classic example of a public good\u2014difficult for the market to supply because, in the absence of government intervention, consumers will take advantage of the infrastructure without paying the costs of using it. Hence there is a role for taxes, fines, and, yes, parking tickets. As for whether parking tickets are a tax on the vulnerable, there actually aren\u2019t any good data that reveal who pays parking tickets. But in a city with as efficient and affordable public transportation system as London\u2019s, it\u2019s fair to assume that low-income families are much more likely than the upper class to ride buses and the Tube. Once one digs a little beneath the surface, the argument that parking tickets are a tax on the vulnerable doesn\u2019t sound too convincing.<\/span><\/h6>\n
The story becomes even more worrisome when one asks Browder about his broader ambitions. After all, in Silicon Valley, the CEO of a successful startup is always considering how to further scale up the company. \u201cI would like to hopefully replace lawyers with technology,\u201d he says, \u201cstarting with very simple things like arguing against parking tickets and then moving toward things like pressing a button and suing someone or pressing a button and getting a divorce.\u201d Browder\u2019s long-term vision is that you\u2019ll never need a trained, human lawyer again and that \u201cconsumers won\u2019t even know what the word lawyer means.\u201d<\/span><\/h6>\n
This is probably music to the ears of many who detest the legal profession, bemoan our society\u2019s litigiousness, and are envious of lawyers\u2019 salaries, which might seem outsized relative to their societal role and contribution. But do we really want to live in a society where people can sue at the push of a button? Would divorce be less painful if algorithms and automated systems were making decisions about who should have custody of the kids and how shared property should be divided?<\/span><\/h6>\n
We don\u2019t want to single out Browder\u2019s pursuit as particularly malignant. He is not a bad person. He just lives in a world where it is normal not to think twice about how new technology companies could create harmful effects. Browder is just one recent example of the start-up mindset birthed at Stanford and in Silicon Valley at large. He\u2019s been encouraged by his professors, his peers, and his investors to think bigger and be ambitious. But too rarely do people stop and ask: Whose problem are you solving? Is it a problem actually worth solving? And is the solution proposed one that would be good for human beings and for society?<\/span><\/h6>\n
A DIFFERENT KIND OF FOUNDER<\/strong><\/span>\nBack in 2004, just as Silicon Valley was reemerging from the \u201cdot-com bust,\u201d a young man named Aaron Swartz enrolled at Stanford University. Like Browder, he had been fascinated by computer programming from an early age. He\u2019d won a national prize at the age of 13 for his creation of an online collaborative library, theinfo.org. At 14, he helped create the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) specification, a widely used internet protocol that permitted automatic access to updates on websites anywhere. The goal was to create open standards that would allow anyone to share and update information on the internet.<\/span><\/h6>\n
Swartz enrolled straightaway in an accelerated course on computer programming while also taking introductory classes in sociology, a seminar on Noam Chomsky, and a required first-year humanities class on freedom, equality, and difference. He found Stanford to be alienating, however. In an online daily journal he kept for a few weeks, he recorded his dissatisfaction with his fellow students\u2014too shallow\u2014and his courses. The humanities lecture, he wrote, \u201cturns out to consist mostly of the three professors arguing with each other about what a paragraph really means\u2026Is this what the humanities is like? Even the RSS debates were better than this.\u201d<\/span><\/h6>\n
Swartz spent much of his time coding on his own. During his freshman year, he applied to join Y Combinator, a newly created tech incubator, to start a company called Infogami that would help manage content on websites. He was selected for the very first cohort of Y Combinator\u2019s Summer Founders Program. By the end of the summer, he decided to continue working on the company, which would soon merge with another Y Combinator startup, Reddit. Two years later Reddit was sold to Cond\u00e9 Nast, reportedly for between $10 million and $20 million, and Swartz became a young millionaire. Reddit is today one of the most popular sites on the internet and is valued at $3 billion.<\/span><\/h6>\n
A brilliant young coder goes to college, then drops out to pursue his start-up dreams. Sounds like the same kind of dropout story that was told about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and would be told again about Mark Zuckerberg and Elizabeth Holmes; the same story that Joshua Browder is currently living out.<\/span><\/h6>\n
But Aaron Swartz was different. He was less interested in making money than in using technology to change how human beings access and interact with information. \u201cInformation is power,\u201d he wrote in a \u201cGuerrilla Open Access Manifesto\u201d in 2008, \u201cbut like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves\u2026But you need not\u2014indeed morally you cannot\u2014keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world.\u201d<\/span><\/h6>\n
Swartz viewed technology as inextricably bound up with politics and saw the effort to control information as a way to control people. He wanted a liberatory technology because he thought it would help bring about a liberatory politics.<\/span><\/h6>\n
In 2006, Swartz attended an international gathering of the Wikipedia community, the people who administer and contribute to the famous open-access, nonprofit, user-generated internet encyclopedia. \u201cAt most \u2018technology\u2019 conferences I\u2019ve been to, the participants generally talk about technology for its own sake. If use ever gets discussed, it\u2019s only about using it to make vast sums of money.\u201d At the Wikipedia conference, however, \u201cthe primary concern was doing the most good for the world, with technology as the tool to help us get there. It was an incredible gust of fresh air, one that knocked me off my feet.\u201d<\/span><\/h6>\n
One of his other efforts was to press for open access to knowledge produced by scholars. It irritated him that in order to read the contents of online journals you either had to be a student or an employee of a university, or you had to pay considerable fees\u2014and this despite the fact that public funds actually financed the work of scholars at both public and private universities. Why should journal articles be copyrighted, with the financial benefits flowing not to the authors of the articles but to the large corporations that owned the scientific journals? In 2010, he began downloading thousands of academic articles from a scholarly repository called JSTOR. He did so by using the computer network at MIT, where a long-standing policy of maintaining an open campus gave permission to anyone on campus, visitors included, to access its network. He wrote a program on his laptop that would automate the downloading process rather than accessing articles one by one, which was the requirement under JSTOR\u2019s terms of service. After several visits to a computer closet, where he connected his laptop to the MIT network, Swartz had downloaded millions of articles, violating JSTOR\u2019s policy and implicating MIT\u2019s network in the violation.<\/span><\/h6>\n
MIT traced the downloads to Swartz\u2019s laptop and the closet from which his computer had accessed the network, and when he came back for another round of downloads in early 2011, he was arrested by MIT police and charged with breaking and entering with intent to commit a felony. JSTOR decided to drop the charges against him after Swartz returned the data files, but MIT elected to continue with its prosecution. In 2012, federal prosecutors added nine felony counts to the charges against him, with a maximum sentence of 50 years in jail. Swartz sank into a depression, and in the midst of multiple efforts at plea bargaining and preparing to go to trial, he committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment in early 2013. He was 26 years old.<\/span><\/h6>\n
It was a devastating end to a life of enormous promise, a life that had already reached celebrity status in tech circles. In the month following his death, the hackers known as Anonymous infiltrated the websites of MIT and the US State Department and declared, \u201cAaron Swartz, this is for you.\u201d Leading tech intellectual Lawrence Lessig eulogized Swartz as someone he had mentored but who, in the end, had really mentored him. Memorials sprang up around the world.<\/span><\/h6>\n
MISPLACED PRIORITIES<\/span><\/strong>\nIt\u2019s impossible to know what Swartz was thinking when he repeatedly violated JSTOR\u2019s terms of service. Or what prosecutors were thinking when they pressed their case even after JSTOR withdrew. And of course, it\u2019s impossible to peer into the mind of a person struggling with depression and wonder what might have brought him to contemplate suicide and then to take his own life. For us, however, Aaron Swartz\u2019s death is a hinge event in the evolution of the politics and ethics of technology. His life, and what became of the world of technology after his death, illustrate broader lessons about what a technologist might bring to the world. For Swartz, learning how to code was part of amassing a toolkit for civic and political change. He was the dropout who saw technology not as a means of becoming rich but as a lever for the pursuit of justice.<\/span><\/h6>\n
While Swartz was alive, he was a hero to many and a celebrity in the world of technology: the kid who helped develop Creative Commons, the tech activist who led a movement to protect net neutrality and beat back the US Congress, the evangelist for open access to knowledge. He was the latest in successive generations of technologists who felt that technology was a tool for human empowerment and espoused unapologetically utopian and radically democratic visions of a technological future, a vision with deep roots in the creation of the internet and the culture of Silicon Valley.<\/span><\/h6>\n
Today, fewer than 10 years after his death, virtually nobody talks about Aaron Swartz. He is mostly forgotten in Silicon Valley, and he is unknown to the wider public. At Stanford University, we rarely meet students who know Swartz\u2019s name or can describe what he did. They do know the names of Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and former Stanford students such as Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the cofounders of Google), Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (the cofounders of Snapchat), Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger (the cofounders of Instagram), and Elon Musk (the founder of SpaceX). And many students on campus today know the name Joshua Browder. If they haven\u2019t heard of his successfully funded startup, they know of his work because he spammed the entire student body in early 2019 to offer them a chance, by using his service DoNotPay, to get out of fees that support a wide array of student groups on campus.<\/span><\/h6>\n
Today, the heroic figures are the disruptive and instantly wealthy innovators. Whereas once technologists brought with them countercultural visions of enhancing human capabilities, promoting liberty and equality, and serving democratic peoples, today the culture of Silicon Valley is about founder worship and the celebration of apolitical coders. This was a profound shift that technologists didn\u2019t notice or didn\u2019t want to acknowledge until they had to in the wake of the social and political fallout from technology\u2019s role in Brexit, the election of Trump, and the siege of the U.S. Capitol.<\/span><\/h6>\n
The rise of the Joshua Browders and the decline of the Aaron Swartzes encapsulate the challenge the world confronts with Silicon Valley. One of the most far-reaching transformations of our age is the wave of digital technologies rolling over and upending nearly every aspect of life. Work and leisure, family and friendship, community and citizenship\u2014all have been reshaped by our now-ubiquitous digital tools and platforms. We know that we are at a turning point. How to think about what should be done, and why, is what we need to grapple with.<\/span><\/h6>\n \n\n<\/div>\nPlease read the excerpt in Fast Company<\/a><\/span><\/strong>.\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After decades of innovation by computer and internet companies unfettered by government regulation, Americans are enjoying the benefits provided by Big Tech\u2014but also contending daily with problems that the industry has ushered in. Even consumers who love their smartphones and Instagram accounts may be concerned about how they siphon up personal data and lure users […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","site-sidebar-layout":"no-sidebar","site-content-layout":"page-builder","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"disabled","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"disabled","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-786","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemerrorbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemerrorbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemerrorbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemerrorbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systemerrorbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/systemerrorbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1632,"href":"https:\/\/systemerrorbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/786\/revisions\/1632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systemerrorbook.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}