The same internet that gives rise to the dystopian narrative has tools to prevent disaster

Don Marti is a strategist in web ecosystem and open source business issues. He is an invited expert for the Privacy Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium and has written or edited for several internet-related publications. 

Big Tech’s ongoing project to crush independent journalism is a small part of a larger, more ambitious narrative, in which the market economy as we know it is replaced by, in effect, economic central planning enabled by “AI.” The so-called Torment Nexus, where, as Hugo-award-winning author Charles Stross writes, a few oligarchs control “state-level policy making on subjects like privacy protection, data mining, face recognition, and generative language models, on the basis of assumptions about how society should be organized,” is a dismal vision of the future.

But even as academics, journalists, and whistleblowers wear out their carpal tunnels documenting Big Tech’s multifarious villainy, the flow of money and customer data to the same companies continues. The book Careless People exposes Meta’s role in promoting genocide and government censorship, but the Careless People page on the publisher site has a Meta Pixel on it. In the previous column in this series, I covered Big Tech’s vision for the economy — a new system, rapidly being realized, where anyone who wants to sell anything sends money and personal data to a few centralized platforms, and gets transactions out — while most of the profits are captured by the platforms, and negative externalities like a mental health crisis and pervasive scams fall on everyone else.

Bringing existential threats down to mere problems

But, to look on the bright side for a minute, this is just an internet dystopia narrative. And the internet turns out to be remarkably good at beating those. We don’t eliminate them entirely, but we take them down from civilization-ending risks to merely ongoing problems that flare up into the occasional crisis. The common thread of any internet dystopia narrative is:

• Powerful adversary with a goal of centralized control;
• Some internet activity where rules favor centralization;
• Consensus that centralization is inevitable.

The best-known dystopia stories have a catchy “chip” name.  Cryptography backdoor dystopia started out with a U.S. government plan to use a key escrow system together with export controls, implemented on a “Clipper Chip” with a back door. Today, end-to-end encryption is built into so many essential processes that it would be impractical to roll back. Risks to confidential communications keep coming up — Chat Control in the EU is the latest, and worthy of attention — but it’s an issue to keep on top of and not the end of the internet. Another dystopia, Digital Rights Management (DRM) mandate, would have put a “Fritz chip” in all devices that could copy digital information, giving some DRM vendor or cartel control of everything. Today, DRM is still a lock-in problem for many products, and limits how much repair work an independent service can do for you, but it’s an issue that’s being debated one product or format at a time.

Marketers are understanding the risks 

Maybe something inherent in the internet’s design causes a dystopia narrative to emerge every so often. The good news for the prospects of beating this one is that marketers are already seeing the risks I covered last time, and looking for alternatives. The Google/Meta duopoly, as growth stocks, must grow at a greater rate than the economy as a whole, which means, on average, taking a bigger piece of every transaction.  “If Google and Facebook ads are the only way for you to reach customers you don’t have a viable business,” Nandini Jammi, a brand consultant and founder of the new firm LTR Partners, told me. “When you build your entire strategy around Facebook or Google ads, it’s like an anti-investment, it’s a dependency on these tools that distract you from building meaningful, sustainable brands.”

In theory, marketers know that marketing benefits from impact and breaking through clutter, but in practice the ad agency BBH found that ”group cohesion” among marketers is the highest for all occupations they studied. High cohesion leads to similar decisions by all members of the group, and today, marketing conventional wisdom treats Big Tech spending as required. But as companies are forced to cut back on quality and service because surveillance advertising captures a larger and larger fraction of every sale, the Wall Street Journal reports that American Customers Are Madder Than Ever. “AI” is not helping. According to AI strategist Anna Blender,  “people rate content suspected of being AI-generated as much worse across metrics like trust and authenticity.” In Australia, “AI slop” is Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. Naturally the opportunities for brands to brag on “human-made” work and try to appeal to Anti-AI “haters” abound.

High tech answers

But the choice to break out of Big Tech value extraction can go in a high-tech direction too. Rick Bruner, CEO of the advertising measurement company Central Control, argues for ”high-quality, randomized controlled trials” to measure ad campaigns — a more trustworthy approach to measurement than throwing money and data at Google and Meta and taking their word for the results. He writes,

As a result of one “rigorous” trial, Netflix eliminated paid search advertising — the kind of decision that can free up significant money for ad-supported news. That will take some work from the publisher side, since, Bruner suggests, “publishers seem unwilling to make the necessary targeting reforms to make them a viable experimental unit to fix the morass of digital advertising measurement.” Moving ad budgets to news is an opportunity for legit ad-supported media that can meet the needs of marketers who know more math than Big Tech wants them to.

Social media is another opportunity for improvement. “Social” doesn’t have to mean dumping people’s data into an ML black box and running the same boring AI slop ads as everyone else. Some of the most powerful social investments are in real-world events that result in content and impact online. In a flood of over-optimized, look-alike mobile game advertising, the game development firm Wargaming.net keeps up a sponsor relationship with The Tank Museum in Bovington, England — a place that most players won’t attend physically, but that acts as a sort of hall of fame for content creators who cover the vehicles players can operate in the games. Buying surveillance ads is renting eyeballs, but in the case of Wargaming, the game company, content creators, and museum have a feedback loop that builds reputation they get to keep. Direct-to-consumer brands are selling through Von Maur, a mall department store, to capture a similar effect.

Marketing decision-makers read the news like the rest of us, and can’t help hearing that Facebook makes 10% of their revenue from scams and ads for banned items, the FBI warns about the security risks of search ads to the end user, and new documents show that Meta buried evidence of the mental health harms they inflict on teenaged users. Marketers want to do the right thing, but as we have seen with previous dystopia threats, sometimes the people affected by a dystopia need a swift kick to get together and fight it. A final bright spot that may provide that swift kick is recent legal cases over the California Invasion of Privacy Act, Video Privacy Protection Act, and other privacy-related laws that may not have been written for the internet but create just enough legal risk for marketers to push them over the line to do the right thing. The good news is group cohesion. Breaking out of surveillance dystopia is good for business, the right thing to do for others, and — with the legal news to point to for justification — the safe, prudent course of action, too.

Next: News companies and organizations, when participating in policy debates, are missing out on opportunities to better represent their own interests, the national interest, and the interests of legitimate businesses. Instead they are acting as sock puppets for Big Tech and advocating for surveillance. How can the news business do better?

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Cite this article

Marti, Don  (2025, Dec. 8). Big Tech’s economic takeover can be beat. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/big-techs-economic-takeover-can-be-beat/