David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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Re-Bundling Protections and Benefits Around Our Work

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Not so long ago, jobs came with a bundle of economic advantages beyond a paycheck. Those advantages included health insurance for you and your family and a pension or post-retirement paycheck based on your years with your employer and how much you’d been paid. 
 
While already a vestige of days past, my job at a municipally-owned utility a little over a decade ago came with family health benefits, a matching 401(k) plan, a pension that vested after 5 years of employment, and days off for a raft of holidays including Flag Day.
 
That job also included additional economic benefits that I didn’t appreciate enough at the time such as the creditworthiness of my regular salary, continuous training to bolster old skills and develop new ones, regular contributions to Social Security for additional retirement security, unemployment compensation if I ever lost my job, and the stability and continuing enrichment of that job for as long as I had it.
 
Today, in many of our full-time jobs and nearly all of our part-time ones, between some and all of this bundle of protections and benefits has disappeared.    
 
It is hard to overstate the significance of this unbundling.
 
Jacob Hacker, a political science professor at Yale calls it a shift of economic risk in his new book The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream.  Hacker argues that the loss of this financial cushion around our work tests our economic resilience whenever unexpected burdens arise.

In the 50 years following the Great Depression, both employers and the government insulated workers from many of the economic risks they might confront when they weren’t working. By contrast, from the 1980s and continuing through today, there has been:

a massive transfer of risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as the government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families. This shift has fundamentally reshaped Americans’ relationships with their government, their employers and each other. And it has altered and sometimes dashed the most fundamental expectations associated with the American Dream: a stable middleclass income, an affordable place to live, a guaranteed pension, good health insurance coverage, greater economic security for one’s kids.

As a result of this sea change, the American worker is increasingly on his or her own when confronting whatever comes next, like sudden illness or loss of a job.
 
Writing this week in the New York Times, Hacker talked about how this “risk shift” is impacting the run-up to the next presidential election, particularly the fact that so many Americans feel insecure.

They may be doing well at the moment, but they fear that, however high they are on the economic ladder, a single bad step or bad event could cause them to slip. A booming economy hasn’t quieted these concerns, because insecurity remains a huge and growing problem in ways that voters and candidates instinctively get, but the sunny job numbers largely hide.

Of course, this insecurity affects not only workers but also the ability of their families, their communities and the country as a whole to flourish—an impact that I discussed a few weeks ago in the post “The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken.”
 
As more of us are “on our own” shouldering the economic risks that employers and the government once protected us from, it has become an increasingly important priority to re-bundle new versions of the benefits and protections that have been lost around working in America.
 
The leading edge of these rebundling efforts are perhaps most visible when it comes to the gig-economy workers who are striving to build a stable and dependable “living” out of a series of independent-contractor jobs both large and small.
 
As I argued last week, technological advances involving blockchain, digital currencies, on-line exchanges and markets are promising to make it possible for independent workers to preserve existing income streams while gaining new (and unexpected) ones. The needs of this growing number of gig-economy workers are stimulating efforts to re-bundle some of those traditional insulators around their work. Fortunately, these same innovations will also help to meet the needs of every insecure worker who is trying to get by in a job with few, if any, of the traditional benefits and protections.

1.         Getting Paid for Jobs Both Big and Small

One of the most tantalizing possibilities of a future enabled by blockchain and digital currencies is that we could all get paid for time and effort we currently give away for free. Last week I mentioned a few of them, like providing traffic information to news outlets about roads we are already driving on at rush hour or being paid by a social media platform whenever we encourage the conversation there. I also mentioned the current backlash from the banking industry to the rise of on-line exchanges that will facilitate these payments. Part of it is an old guy-new guy turf war.
 
Over the past week, I’ve come upon some additional information about the hurdle that stands in the way of more seamless payments for a succession of small and big jobs. David Galbraith is a partner at Anthemis, a company seeking creative opportunities between the start-ups and financial institutions that are dedicated to reinventing financial services for the digital marketplace. In a recent interview, Galbraith remarked on the fundamental differences between on-line platforms that cater to consumers in America and their counterpart platforms in China. 
 
In America, digital platforms like Google and Facebook are supported by advertising revenues while in China a platform’s revenue streams come directly from consumers when they buy something they’ve seen there. In other words, the payments process in China is simplified by removing advertising from the business model. Another difference is that Chinese consumers pay for consumer goods with their bank account balances, while American platforms interpose financial intermediaries like PayPal or bank-owned credit card companies that stand between the tech platforms and consumers. As Galbraith observes, the transactions costs are lower in China, “friction is taken out of the system,” and purchases are completed in a “fundamentally more fluid fashion” on the smartphones of Chinese consumers without prompting by a blizzard of ads.
 
When the inefficiencies imposed by banks and an advertising-based model are removed from the digital “payments system” in America, payments to gig economy workers for big and small increments of work will also be facilitated—making these new jobs more robust. At the most basic level, these changes in how we get paid will support the ways that many of us are working now and even more of us will be working tomorrow.

2.         Anxiety About Retirement

When it comes to re-bundling benefits and protections around workers, none may be more significant than retirement security.
 
A recent article called “Why Work Has Failed Us: Because No One Can Afford to Retire Anymore” provides statistics that indicate how much the “shift in risk” from pensions to “figure out your own retirement” has impacted American workers:

66% of millennials have nothing saved for retirement. Among the working-age families that have retirement savings, the median balance is $5,000, according to the most recent data available from the Economic Policy Institute. For families approaching retirement, the median savings is $21,000–after taxes, on its own, enough to last a couple a little more than a year living at the federal poverty line.

At the same time, the enormity of these unfunded liabilities—how will all of these people with limited retirement savings support themselves?—presents a corresponding opportunity for entrepreneurs who want to help workers regain at least some of their retirement-related security. In the same interview where he discussed digital payment innovations, David Galbraith also considered the enormity of the opportunity for the new fin-tech companies that are trying to meet this need.

[R]etirement is the biggest [risk] shift anyone can possibly imagine. To put a number on it — the committed pension liability shortfalls in developing nations are 450 trillion dollars. That’s half a quadrillion dollars. So when people talk about billion dollar market opportunities — this is a half a quadrillion dollar shift in money. 

Of course, no one has found a feasible way to fill the deficit for those who have nothing to retire on today, but there is opportunity in providing expertise to workers who have at least some retirement savings.
 
Most of us don’t know how to take what we have today and marshal it to cover uncertainties like how much income we’ll need to live after we retire, how long we’re likely to live, what Social Security elections we should make, and how much medical care we’ll need along the way. This is where a new company like Kindur comes in, according to Galbraith.
 
Kindur helps workers create retirement portfolios that minimize their tax burdens while ensuring that the money they do have for retirement lasts as long as possible. Unlike investment advisors who charge commissions to maximize your savings, Kindur utilizes its on-line platform and need assessment programming to help individuals design their future income. There has never been a web-based service like this before. As the company’s tagline says: “It’s like fuel efficiency for your retirement.”
 
Kindur isn’t the only fin-tech company that is aiming to provide more comfort (or bundling) around worker retirement. This article from the New York Times last December discusses some of the others.
 
For a rising gig-economy workforce and the traditional workers who are seeking supplemental income and greater autonomy in the gig economy, the empowerment of acting in more entrepreneurial ways is easily undermined by retirement anxieties. Today, both traditional advocates and new companies are finding other ways to calm those anxieties too.

3.         Additional Protections and Benefits for Today’s Workforce

With the exception of supporting teachers in several high-profile confrontations with school districts and state funders recently, labor unions’ ability to protect workers in “union shops” seem to have lost much of their influence over economic decision-makers. They’ve also had a spotty record protecting their members’ bundled benefits and protections over the past 35 years. But while continuing to be the obvious champions for workers pitted against corporate profit taking, as the ways we work evolve, organized labor has other important roles to play in benefiting its changing membership.
 
Workers no longer stay in one locality with one employer for the course of their careers like they once did. Moreover, the average worker today takes on several different kinds of jobs. In this new world of work, services to meet these realities are desperately needed by the rank-and-file.
 
For example, unions could help their memberships “vote with their feet” when unbundled jobs no longer support them while providing assistance with “reskilling” when needed, help in finding new work, and housing in the new communities. Moreover, if unions were already providing these services in a tight labor market like we have today, their negotiating power with employers who are reluctant to lose workers would be enhanced significantly.
 
As Nicholas Colin writes in his thoughtful new book about the future of work called Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age:

[I]t’s time we imagine unions that support workers as they switch jobs, unions that would provide their members with all of the resources necessary to find inspiration (“What should I do?”), train (“How can I acquire new skills?”), find a new employer (“When do I start?”), relocate (“I need an affordable house close to my new workplace”).

Labor unions should be key contributors to a re-bundled workforce in traditional companies as well as in the new gig-economy as free-lancers, for example, unionize to protect themselves.
 
The tremendous need among workers that has been created by the unbundling of jobs has also spelled opportunity for new service providers beyond the need for a more secure retirement. Take a company like Portify that aims to help independent workers in the gig economy who are unable to obtain affordable credit without “a regular salary” and an employment contract.
 
Portify is currently in the beta-phase of providing financing to independent workers whose only source today is a payday loan charging an exorbitant interest rate. With access to information about its customers’ cash flows and bank accounts, Portify is able to understand what its customers can afford to borrow and to make loans at a substantially lower rate than payday lenders. By doing so, it will provide gig economy workers with the ability to finance growth opportunities so that a succession of smaller jobs can eventually add up to a sustainable and profitable business.
 
Another promising start-up is Dublin-based Trezeo, which is “an income-smoothing service” for self-employed people. The company calculates its clients’ average weekly income. If that income dips because a client takes a day off or someone doesn’t pay them for their work, Trezeo “tops them up to” their average income with the understanding that it will be paid back when the client is paid again. A service like Trezeo’s allows workers to maintain a steady quality of life–some of that bundling again–despite the ups and downs of gig-economy work.
 
Finally, Zego is a new company that provides gig economy workers with flexible insurance. For example, if you occasionally drive for Uber, you may not earn enough to afford the additional monthly or annual car insurance coverage that you should have.
 
To meet this problem, Zego sells insurance by the hour. For drivers, it utilizes an app to collect data about how often they are working and where they are driving that helps it to assess their insurance risks and issue coverage more affordably. Moreover, without a product like Zego’s, independent workers could be put out of business by a single workplace loss that they are unable to cover. A start-up company like this bundles these workers in greater risk protections than were available before.

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The upside of entrepreneurial, gig-economy jobs is that they promise greater autonomy, flexibility and self-fulfillment, but these work rewards can never be realized when the jobs themselves are laced with insecurity.

The bundling of benefits and protections around these new jobs (and their re-bundling around traditional jobs) promises to reduce more of that insecurity for millions of workers.

Instead of giving up in the face of growing income inequality and job-killing automation, there are thinkers, writers and entrepreneurs who are more hopeful about the future of work because they acknowledge their own and other people’s agency to build a future where workers, their families and communities can flourish again.
 
Slowly but surely, that hopeful future is being built by the re-bundlers of work today.

This post was adapted from my May 26, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. 

The Face-Offs That Fuel Good Work

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Good work always has a long-term goal. 
 
I’m thinking this week about long-term goals of mine, like acting to confront climate change and the assaults on knowledge by misinformation. Both goals are intertwined and both seem difficult if not impossible to impact. How can my actions advance either of these priorities?
 
I always have a lot on my To Do List, and my impulse is always to check off one big item and move on to the next one. Climate change and misinformation are big items. But then I remember that one of my jobs this time of year is groundskeeper. In the near acre around my home, I’ve learned the hard way to move away from bold, all-at-once kinds of goals like “give the whole place a haircut” to keeping my intentions smaller and closer to the ground.
 
Nature has forced me to become more modest when it comes to shaping its whims to my demands given the time, tools and sweat I can commit. I have more confidence than I used to that chipping away a little at a time will bring the landscape towards “what I have in mind” for this unruly plot in the middle of a city. Knowing that victories “only I can see” will eventually add up to the embrace of trees, hedges, plots and vistas in my imagination is what turns my job as groundskeeper into good work.
 
Groundskeeper lessons dovetail nicely with a couple of quotes from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark about even more daunting challenges and where we find the hope to confront them.

in Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of boat owners rescued people—single moms, toddlers, grandfathers—stranded in attics, on roofs, in flooded housing projects, hospitals, and school buildings. None of them said, I can’t rescue everyone, therefore it’s futile, therefore my efforts are flawed and worthless, though that’s often what people say about more abstract issues in which, nevertheless, lives, places, cultures, species, rights are at stake.

Of course, it’s that first rescue that seeds the hope to become a rescuer again: the first act making your next act possible. Solnit gets lyrical here:

You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we carry into the night that is the future.

“You row forward looking back”—even if only you can find anything worth celebrating in what you’ve done already—because you’ve turned what were once only good intentions into the on-going satisfaction of good work.
 
Whenever my values and priorities have me seeing the battle ahead as light versus darkness, I’ve had to re-learn the wisdom of Voltaire when he told me that “the best is the enemy of the good” and Aesop when he taught me why the tortoise beats the hare. They’re cold water on a hot parade every single time, but also the most sensible marching orders. Lately, I’ve been pondering how they should guide my “face-offs” with climate change and the ongoing assault on knowledge.
 
What actions will seed enough hope to fuel my next ones?

How does good work on both of these challenges get off the ground?

1.         Confronting Climate Change

Celebrating the beauty and wonder of nature and reminders about the gorgeously nuanced ways that we used to talk about them (like Robert MacFarland does) reinforce those who are already believers in nature. Warnings based on the science or on what prophetic observers carry back to us from the frontlines also speak mostly to believers who were already open enough to hear the call (my recent post about Barry Lopez’s Horizon).
 
These celebrations and warnings only reach unbelievers when they’ve already made themselves available for persuasion—which is not often enough. Communing with believers can feel like a tent revival when most of those who need converting are still outside the tent. Given my experience as an advocate for clients and for new ventures in business and government, I’ve been looking for ways to persuade more of the unbelievers to come into the tent so they can hear the call too.
 
The challenge for would-be persuaders is enormous given our values (or “political predispositions,” since they are largely the same on an issue like this) and other priorities that we have as Americans. In a widely-read and research-intensive article called “Climate Change: US Public Opinion,” political scientists Patrick J. Egan at NYU and Megan Mullin at Duke describe Americans’ reactions to climate change as of 2016 from polling and other analyses they conducted:

The public’s level of concern about climate change has not risen meaningfully over the past two decades, and addressing the problem with government action ranks among one of the lowest priorities for Americans….Even liberals and Democrats who accept climate change science and express concerns about global warming’s affects rank the problem well below many other national priorities…In 2016, for example, Pew found Democrats prioritizing climate change lower than several concerns not traditionally associated with their party, including terrorism and crime…[So] the effort to slow global warming is additionally challenged by the fact that the issue has no core constituency with a concentrated interest in climate change.

It feels much the same today.

Features of climate change in particular have put the challenge of confronting it on a low burner. As examples, Egan and Mullin point to:

– our highly-politicized disagreement about whether there is really a problem with man-made climate change at all; as well as 

-how a changing climate is difficult if not impossible for the average person to see; 

-the difficulty of attributing events (like a particular fire or a storm) to the broader phenomenon; and 

-the often-mentioned fact that the worst effects of climate change will happen in the future and be experienced someplace other than America.

Politics aside, the imperceptibility and remoteness of climate change make it difficult for most of the public to make the imaginative leap into actively addressing it.

I discussed one response that these authors recommend here last week. Within the conservative, libertarian and Republican “values” communities, formerly skeptical thought leaders who have become convinced that the threats of climate change must be addressed are perhaps the only ones who can enlist their communities’ support by “making hay” out of the same reasoning that persuaded them.

Egan and Mullin also identify two avenues for someone like me, who is already convinced about the urgency of the problem but is looking for a way to persuade the vast majority who, while not quite skeptical or politically-opposed, fail to see it as a priority that’s important enough to act upon. These avenues exist in places where the effects of climate change are (in all likelihood) being experienced already, or rely upon policy developments in states like California and New York where climate change has already seized a larger share of the public’s imagination.

According to the authors, the more that members of the public “correlate key weather events they have experienced with climate change,” the more important or “salient” the issue becomes to them. For example, those who experienced flooding in Staten Island or along the Jersey shore after Hurricane Sandy may not be convinced enough by the correlation to support a comprehensive national climate change policy but they probably want to “adapt” to its likely risks and become more “resilient” in the face of future ones.

If the connection between extreme weather and climate change is strengthened, this may expand the national conversation from mitigation alone to adaptation and resilience. Even under the most optimistic emissions scenarios, infrastructure investments will be needed to reduce the harmful effects of climate change on Americans

Since this article was written, correlations between climate change and practical responses to its likely risks have also been made by Americans who were impacted by the recent wildfires around Paradise California and are regularly inundated by high tides in Miami in the absence of any storm activity. There are clusters of Americans along its vulnerable coastlines and in the more fire-prone West who are correlating climate change with risks that are no longer theoretical.
 
As people pay the costs of what is probably climate change, the core, underlying problem becomes more of a priority. The “good work” of persuasion is more hopeful when done in places and around events where meeting some of its likely harms have already been bought and paid for. These communities have, in effect, been opened to persuasion by climate-related impacts that seem new to them and out of proportion to what they have experienced before. That means my advocacy to enlist their further commitment to mitigate climate change itself (and not merely react to it) holds out the hope of bearing fruit.
  
Egan and Mullin also cite research that proves “the very strong correlation between state policy and public opinion” and argue that states like California and New York are already influencing the national policy debate by acting alone. While the authors don’t say, I’d argue that it’s harder for fence-sitters on climate change to continue to remain uncommitted when majorities in other states are investing their tax dollars in targeted policies. Those “watching but not yet acting” are also susceptible to committing more deeply if the advocate they’re listening to avoids the partisan bloodletting while persuading them with arguments that have already succeeded in these vanguard jurisdictions.
 
Like my groundskeeper or Solnit’s rescuers during Hurricane Katrina, each patient step of persuasive advocacy can build hope in the next step until the core constituency to confront climate change has been assembled and activated by my good work and the good work of many others.
 
(While I recommend it highly, the Egan-Mullin article is dense with charts and annotations. To make it more accessible, one of its many fans created a comic book version that’s also worth a look.)

2.         Speaking Up for What I Know

These days, even what we consider to be “knowledge” (that’s supported by evidence, is worthy of belief, and is accepted as true) isn’t safe in a world of communication that’s dominated by information-sharing platforms like Facebook, Twitter and You Tube.

In the climate change debate for example, conclusions that are based on carefully assembled scientific evidence often seem to be given the same weight and claim of legitimacy as the arguments of climate change deniers. Egan and Mullin illustrate how media channels have regularly allowed deniers to create an equivalence between their ignorance and the fact-based evidence that scientists have been gathering.

As the public was learning about the [climate change] problem in the 1990’s, the mainstream media’s adherence to the journalistic norm of balancing coverage between two sides of a dispute resulted in misrepresentation of climate change science [and] understanding the scientific certainty about [the] human contribution to the problem.

Danah Boyd is a principle researcher at Microsoft. Her recent speech to a group of librarians arises out of the same vulnerability that all “knowledge” faces in the current media landscape. She aims her argument at librarians because “[y]ou all are deeply committed to producing, curating, and enabling access to knowledge. Many of you embraced the internet with glee” because it promised to make what is “not yet knowledgeable” available to more people while reducing overall ignorance. But today she asks them: 

-what if the internet and its on-line communities are being subverted by misinformation instead of liberated by knowledge? 

-what if this misinformation is being manufactured in order “to purposefully and intentionally seed doubt” and “to fragment society” instead of enabling honest debate and our ability to move on together when the debate is done?

In her speech, Boyd describes how misinformation that is designed to divide is being deployed and what people who are committed to defending knowledge can do about it?

One of the best ways to sow misinformation is to make sure that doubtful and conspiratorial content is easier to access than evidence-based material.  For example, she cites the gunman who recently massacred Muslims while they were worshipping in Christchurch, New Zealand. He exploited “the information ecosystem” we are all immersed in to ensure that his video recording of his killing spree was widely shared before content moderators could discover it. He filled “the data void” about his mentors and beliefs in a widely-reported counterpoint to those who condemned his actions, as if there were a legitimate debate about it. He “produc[ed] a media spectacle” by using the available channels to disseminate misinformation to millions who were susceptible to his disunifying message. 

There are opportunities to provide misinformation whenever there is “a data void” created by the media’s’ (and the public’s) curiosity. Why did he kill Muslims? Why is climate change a hoax? One way to fill the data void is with words that are strategically created to muddle what we know and how we feel about it. Boyd talks about how Frank Luntz accomplished this with words and phrases that were designed to seed doubt around various issues. Luntz is a “public opinion guru” perhaps best known for developing talking points and filling the data void around Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America.

In the 1990s, Frank Luntz was the king of doing this with terms like partial-birth abortion, climate change [or the even more muddling, global warming]  and death tax. Every week, he coordinated congressional staffers and told them to focus on the term of the week and push it through the news media. All to create a drumbeat.

All to engender emotional dissonance if not quite rational doubt.

According to Boyd, media manipulators also:

create [information] networks that are hard to undo. YouTube has great scientific videos about the value of vaccination, but countless anti-vaxxers have systematically trained YouTube to make sure that people who watch the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s videos also watch videos asking questions about vaccinations or videos of parents who are talking emotionally about what they believe to be the result of vaccination. They comment on both of these videos, they watch them together, they link them together. This is the structural manipulation of media. Journalists often get caught up in telling “both sides,” but the creation of sides is a political project.

So if “the other side” is misinformation, what should defenders of knowledge do? Here’s the straw man that won’t work:

You will not achieve an informed public simply by making sure that high quality content is publicly available and presuming that credibility is enough while you wait for people to come find it.

And here’s invitation from Boyd that I’m accepting:

You have to understand the networked nature of the information war we’re in, actively be there when people are looking, and blanket the information ecosystem with the information people need to make informed decisions.

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Moving from best intentions to good work is the biggest and most important step of all. For me, it involves discovering where and how to take it.

This post was adapted from my May 12, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. 

The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken

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A growing part of the American economy—the part that’s harvesting and utilizing our personal data to drive what we consume—no longer depends on “the basic reciprocities” that once supported our social contract. In other segments of our economy, business is also profiting at worker’s expense and democratic capitalism’s promises to us about shared prosperity are regularly broken.
 
The mutual benefits of a capitalist economy were supposed to include our thriving as workers, being fairly compensated for our work and able to support our families and communities, while our employers also thrived when we used our paychecks to buy their goods and services. That virtuous circle has been the bedrock of capitalism’s social contract since Adam Smith first described it 300 years ago.
 
Today, its bonds are weakened, if not altogether broken.
 
A leading edge of the breakdown is tech platforms harvesting our personal data “for free” while selling it to others who use it to drive our decisions about what we consume.  In what’s been called “surveillance capitalism,” we’re no longer valued at the front end of the exchange for what we provide (in this instance, our information). Instead our only value is at the back-end, determined by how much the companies that utilize our data can manipulate us into buying whatever they’re selling.  
 
In this growing segment of our economy, largely exploitative exchanges have already replaced mutually beneficial ones. In addition to not paying us for our information, this economic model creates very few jobs in a departure from the consumer-oriented companies of the past. Its failure to value what we’re providing as workers and consumers relative to the enormous profits its trophy companies are reaping undermines both the health of the economy and the democratic institutions that depend on it.  
 
In our economy’s more traditional jobs, we are also losing out today when it comes to the fair exchange of our work for its supposed benefits. A broader stagnation in the American economy results when the benefits that companies gain from pro-business policies fail to “trickle down” and benefit the vast majority of workers who lack the financial security to also be shareholders in these same companies. The result is a yawning wealth gap between the 1% (or, perhaps more accurately, the top 10%) and every other American.
 
Communities break down both economically and politically when we’re not compensated adequately for the work and information that we provide. What were supposed to be “a series of mutual benefit equations” between workers and employers, consumers and companies that sell us things, have become increasingly unbalanced.

The first discussion today looks at this breakdown in the social contract. The second part argues for a shift in priorities that can confront the perils of surveillance capitalism along with other distortions—like income inequality and stagnant growth—that harm all but a small percentage of those who participate in America’s economy today.
 
Instead of more failed attempts to increase economic opportunity through pro-business polices or to limit the harms of this approach with band aids for those it leaves behind, a far better alternative is promoting work for all who are willing to do it, while making the dignity of work (and the thriving families and communities that good work produces) our priorities. Rebalancing the economic equation for workers and consumers will enable the economy to benefit nearly everyone again while mending vital parts of America’s promise.
 
I took the pictures here in Germantown, a nearby “town” in Philadelphia where the Revolutionary War battle took place. Three centuries ago, America’s democratic capitalism began in places like Germantown. In the fabric of its old and repurposed buildings, it’s not difficult to find a metaphor when you’re looking for one.
 
In the side of one old factory, there is a bricked-in wall where there used to be a workroom. In the future of our work, I’d argue that bricked-over workrooms like this, where we used to benefit from our contributions as workers and consumers, need to be opened up and revitalized. We need to call out our increasingly feudal system for what it is, and reorient our priorities to restore basic economic relationships that are foundation stones for our way of life.

The Fundamental Breakdown

In a post from January, I discussed the arguments that Oren Cass makes in his new book The Once and Future Worker about how the mutually beneficial relationships between workers, consumers and businesses have broken down since the 1970s and our repeated failures to address the imbalance.  As I said at the time:

[Cass] is concerned about the vast majority of urban, suburban and rural workers who are not sharing in America’s prosperity because of policy choices that have been made over the past 50 years by “the Left” (for more government spending on safety nets) and “the Right” (for its insistence on driving [business profits] over every other priority). Putting expensive band-aids on the victims of pro-growth government policies—when we could simply be making better choices—is hardly a sustainable way forward in Cass’s view.

Cass argues that propping up business to create a bigger pie for all has been a failure because those bigger slices are being eaten almost exclusively by business owners and their investors as opposed to their workers, their communities, or the economy at large. To counter this result, Cass wants policy makers to adopt entirely different priorities than the Right and Left have been embracing, namely, active, sustained promotion of “a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities [as] the central determinant of long term prosperity.” Several of his proposals about how to do so, along with his views about the dignity of work and its importance to democracy, are set out in that earlier post.

Cass’s conclusion (and mine) is that America needs to change its economic priorities before the costs of failure get any worse.

In another new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff focuses on a leading edge of the current problem: the stark imbalance in “behavioral futures markets” where data about what we “are likely to want next” has tremendous value to companies selling us products and services but which no one has been paying us to provide. For Zuboff, these tech platforms, along with the marketers and sellers who buy our behavioral information, have created “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material” while implementing “a parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification.” If the industry players can seduce you into giving enough information about your motivations and desires to your smart phones, smart speakers, social networks and search engines, they can persuade you to buy (or do) almost anything. 

Zuboff discusses how economic theorists from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek legitimized capitalism as a system where workers needed to be paid well enough to provide for their families, be productive members of their communities, and have enough spending money left over to buy the products and services that companies like their employers were providing. In an essay that laid out her argument before Surveillance Capitalism was published, Zuboff cites economic historian Karl Polanyi for his views about how American companies after World War II were expected to offer a kind of communal reciprocity that involved hiring the available workers, hiking wages when possible, and sharing their prosperity rather than hoarding it. 

Polanyi knew that capitalism was never self-regulating, could be profoundly destructive, and that its foreseeable human tolls needed to be minimized. To do so, “measures and policies” also had to be integrated “into powerful institutions [that were] designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land and money.” Zuboff cites Polanyi’s post-War study of General Motors not only for for the ways that fair labor practices, unionization and collective bargaining preserved “the organic reciprocities” between its workers and owners but also for how much the public appreciated these shared benefits at the time.

In the 1950s, for example, 80 percent of [American] adults said that ‘big business’ was a good thing for the country, 66 percent believed that business required little or no change, and 60 percent agreed, ‘the profits of large companies help make things better for everyone who buys their products or services.’

It was a balance that persisted for almost 40 years until what Zuboff calls “the ascendancy of neoliberalism” promoted an extreme form of capitalism where owner profits and share price were paramount and a responsible commitment to workers and communities no longer held capitalism’s worst tendencies in check. Around 1980, Oren Cass notes a related shift. Instead of creating worker satisfaction through “the dignity of work,” there was an economic policy shift from promoting worker satisfaction through the quality of their jobs to keeping them happy as consumers by giving them more stuff to buy with their paychecks. 
 
Zuboff argues that the surveillance capitalists stepped in once these established reciprocities were breached, with profound effects for individual Americans as workers and consumers, for communities whose vitality depends on them, and for our democratic way of life itself. 
 
Instead of paying for the parts of us that they’re profiting from, the surveillance capitalists pay us nothing for our behavioral data. Given the enormous size and profitability of companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, they also “give back” far fewer jobs to the employment market than a GM once did. Moreover, these companies feel that they owe us nothing in exchange for manipulating us into buying whatever they’re selling—what Zuboff calls a kind of  “radical indifference.” Without so much as an afterthought, they take without giving much back to us individually, to the job market, or to the community at large. Capitalism’s ability to lift all boats was supposed to be a driving force for democracy and the genius of the American Dream.

The absence of organic reciprocities with people as sources of either consumers or employees is a matter of exceptional importance in light of the historical relationship between market capitalism and democracy. In fact, the origins of democracy in both Britain and America have been traced to these very reciprocities. [the citations I’ve omitted here are provided in her essay]

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff describes the problem but doesn’t propose solutions. Cass, on the other hand, argues that capitalism remains the best hope for workers to reclaim their share of economic prosperity, but that we’ll have to change our public policies in order to restore the necessary reciprocities.  As for surveillance capitalism, tech futurist Jaron Lanier made an early argument for countering tech company indifference and reclaiming the benefit of our personal data in his 2013 book Who Owns the Future?  His proposals are even more feasible today.

The bricked-off memory of this old workroom seems more hopeful in the springtime.

Restoring the Balance

Cass’s Once and Future Worker is an important book because he backs up his ideological preferences with hard data. His solutions begin with the need for new government policies that aim to support thriving workers, families and communities by reinforcing the democratic give-and-take that is barely holding America together today. Along the way, Cass never loses sight of the real human impacts—for better and for worse—of economic forces and the policies that attempt to manage them.
 
For example, in his chapter “A Future for Work,” Cass argues that the workforce disruptions that will result from automation are a natural and positive effect of every innovation from the Industrial Revolution to the present. Learning how to do more with less is essential for economic growth. At the same time however, he argues strenuously that gains in economic productivity from new inventions and technologies (fewer workers producing the same amount) need to be matched by policy-driven gains in overall economic output (which will give displaced workers the ability to find new jobs as more wealth is created, living standards improve and consumer demand grows).

This is precisely what happened from 1947 to 1972, widely seen as the golden age of American manufacturing and the nation’s middle class. Economy-wide productivity increased by 99 percent; only fifty workers were needed by the end of the Vietnam War to do the work that one hundred could complete at the end of World War II. The result was not mass unemployment. Instead, America produced more stuff. The same share of the population was working in 1972 as in 1947, and men’s median income was 86 percent higher…[W]ith fewer workers required to produce the output of 1947, many could serve markets in 1972 that hadn’t existed a generation earlier or that had been much smaller.

Cass admits that these disruptions are hard for individual workers to weather but that expanding economic output always provides new jobs for displaced workers eventually. I’ve discussed the theory that at least some workers can prepare for disruptions like automation by developing skills “at the scalable edges” of their industries before their jobs disappear. But Cass also cites the introduction of ATM machines and fears about bank closures for an easier transition given the health of the economy at the time. In the years when ATM machines debuted, economic output (or an expanding economy) was matching productivity gains (and business profits). Since these ATMs lowered the banks’ cost of doing business, they repeatedly responded by opening more branches and creating new jobs.
 
Unfortunately, government statistics indicate that current productivity gains are not being matched by gains in overall economic output. It is a time when companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are using their innovations to maximize corporate profits but provide relatively few jobs while exploiting free user data–giving back little (beyond convenience) that can enable workers, families and communities to thrive as well. So if you don’t feel like you’re “getting ahead” today, it’s not your imagination; the output economy that creates new economic opportunities and new jobs isn’t keeping up, and it hasn’t been doing so for years. Writes Cass:

From 1950 to 2000, while productivity in the manufacturing sector rose by 3.1 percent annually, value-added output grew by 3.6 percent—and employment increased, from 14 million to 17 million. During 2000-2016, productivity rose by a similar 3.3 percent annually. But output growth was only 1.1 percent—and employment fell, from 17 million to 12 million. Even with all of the technological advancement of the twenty-first century, had manufacturers continued to grow their businesses at the same rate as in the prior century, they would have needed more workers—a total of 18 million, by 2016 [if output had also been growing].

While he does not describe the problem in terms of “reciprocities” between workers, businesses and consumers like Zuboff, Cass would agree that the imbalances between them are at the heart of the problem and need to be corrected. Once again, several of the policy solutions he proposes are reviewed in my January post. All reject the failed economic policies of the Left and the Right in favor of new approaches that will help workers, families and communities to thrive even if we have to settle for making somewhat less money as an economy overall.
 
Long before Shoshana Zuboff was railing about “surveillance capitalism,” Jaron Lanier was arguing that our behavioral information has tremendous value to the tech platforms, marketers and sellers or what he calls the “Siren Servers” that are harvesting it, and that we should be putting a price tag on our personal data before they take any more of it for free. 
 
Like both Zuboff and Cass, Lanier believes in an economy that is sustained by a thriving middle class with plenty of hard, fulfilling work. His quandary is finding a way that more livelihoods can be sustained “in a world in which information is king,” as his Guardian book reviewer put it.

To that end, Lanier fears that in the early days of the internet we spent too much time worrying about open access and too little, if any time worrying about the digital economy’s likely impacts on job security and the monetizing of user information.  Lanier emphasizes the highly personal nature of this exploitation by arguing that our behavioral data “is people in disguise” and morally intertwined with the humans who supplied it.
 
Lanier’s corrective is to implement a system where we would each be given “nanopayments” for the use of our biometric property. In 2013, he envisioned more sophisticated archives to record where our data originates as well as what it should be worth. He takes over half of his book to describe this mechanism. For our purposes, what he envisioned five years ago can be reduced (although far too easily) to a series of blockchain-based payments for our provision of useful personal data, similar to the system discussed here in a post from last August. Lanier’s nanopayments to individuals whenever a company profits from their personal information would be daunting to implement but it would also go a long way towards restoring Zuboff’s “organic reciprocities” and bringing Cass’s broader economic growth into the business of surveillance capitalism.

+ + +

The mutual benefits that we once enjoyed as workers, consumers and business owners in exchange for what we were providing is no longer a reality. The reasons for that loss and the blame for those responsible are just the front-end of our thinking about what we’re prepared to do about it.
 
In the election cycles ahead of us, it is hard to believe that our nation will have the kind of reasoned debate that we need to be having about the future of our work and its impact on our families, our local communities and our way of life itself. But maybe, hopefully, a conversation along the lines I am arguing for above will begin alongside the shouting matches we are already having about the need to abandon democratic capitalism altogether.
 
Cass, Zuboff and Lanier all begin with the proposition—and it’s where I start too—that our future needs to be built by human workers and that the work we’ll be doing needs to enable us, our loved ones, our neighbors, our shared economy, and not merely a protected few, to flourish.  
 
We have managed to do this before.

Many of us have experienced its mutual benefit in our lifetimes, and we can experience it again.
 
But first, we’ll need to restore the social contract around our work.

This post was adapted from my April 21, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe on this page, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning. 

The Human Purpose Behind Smart Cities

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It is human priorities that should be driving Smart City initiatives, like the ones in Toronto profiled here last week. 

Last week’s post also focused on a pioneering spirit in Toronto that many American cities and towns seem to have lost. While we entrench in the moral righteousness of our sides in the debate—including, for many, a distrust of collective governance, regulation and taxation—we drift towards an uncertain future instead of claiming one that can be built on values we actually share. 

In its King Street and Quayside initiatives, Toronto is actively experimenting with the future it wants based on its residents’ commitment to sustaining their natural environment in the face of urban life’s often toxic impacts.  They’re conducting these experiments in a relatively civil, collaborative and productive way—an urban role model for places that seem to have forgotten how to work together. Toronto’s bold experiments are also utilizing “smart” technologies in their on-going attempts to “optimize” living and working in new, experimental communities.

During a short trip this week, I got to see the leading edges of New York City’s new Hudson Yards community (spread over 28 acres with an estimated $25 billion price tag) and couldn’t help being struck by how much it catered to those seeking more luxury living, shopping and workspaces than Manhattan already affords. In other words, how much it could have been a bold experiment about new ways that all of its citizens might live and work in America’s first city for the next half-century, but how little it actually was. A hundred years ago, one of the largest immigrant migrations in history made New York City the envy of the world. With half of its current citizens being foreign-born, perhaps the next century, unfurling today, belongs to newer cities like Toronto.

Still, even with its laudable ambition, it will not be easy for Toronto and other future-facing communities to get their Smart City initiatives right, as several of you were also quick to remind me last week. Here is a complaint from a King Street merchant that one of you (thanks Josh!) found and forwarded that seems to cast what is happening in Toronto in a less favorable light than I had focused upon it:

What a wonderful story. But as with [all of] these wonderful plans some seem to be forgotten. As it appears are the actual merchants. Google certainly a big winner here. Below an excerpt written by one of the merchants:
   
‘The City of Toronto has chosen the worst time, in the worst way, in the worst season to implement the pilot project. Their goal is clearly to move people through King St., not to King St. For years King St. was a destination, now it is a thoroughfare.
 
‘The goal of the King St. Pilot project was said to be to balance three important principles: to move people more effectively on transit, to support business and economic prosperity and to improve public space. In its current form, the competing principles seem to be decidedly tilted away from the economic well-being of merchants and biases efficiency over convenience. The casual stickiness of pedestrians walking and stopping at stores, restaurants and other merchants is lost.
 
‘Additionally, the [transit authority] TTC has eliminated a number of stops along King St., forcing passengers to walk further to enter and disembark streetcars, further reducing pedestrian traffic and affecting areas businesses. The TTC appears to believe that if they didn’t have to pick up and drop off people, they could run their system more effectively.
 
‘The dubious benefits of faster street car traffic on King St. notwithstanding, the collateral damage of the increased traffic of the more than 20,000 cars the TTC alleges are displaced from King St to adjoining streets has turned Adelaide, Queen, Wellington and Front Sts. into a gridlock standstill. Anyone who has tried to navigate the area can attest that much of the time, no matter how close you are you can’t get there from here.
 
‘Along with the other merchants of King St. and the Toronto Entertainment District we ask that Mayor Tory and Toronto council to consider a simple, reasonable and cost-effective alternative. Put lights on King St. that restrict vehicle traffic during rush hours, but return King St. to its former vibrant self after 7 p.m., on weekends and statutory holidays. It’s smart, fair, reasonable and helps meet the goals of the King St. pilot project. 

Two things about this complaint seemed noteworthy. The first is how civil and constructive this criticism is in a process that hopes to “iterate” as real time impacts are assessed. It’s a tribute that Toronto’s experiments not only invite but are also receiving feedback like this. Alas, the second take-away from Josh’s comment is far more nettlesome. “[However many losers there may be along the way:] Google certainly a big winner here.”

The tech giant’s partnership with Canada’s governments in Toronto raises a constellation of challenging issues, but it’s useful to recall that pioneers who dare to claim new frontiers always do so with the best technology that’s available. While the settling of the American West involved significant collateral damage (to Native Americans and Chinese migrants, to the buffalo and the land itself), it would not have been possible without existing innovations and new ones that these pioneers fashioned along the way. Think of the railroads, the telegraph poles, even something as low-tech as the barbed wire that was used to contain livestock. 

The problem isn’t human and corporate greed or heartless technology—we know about them already—but failing to recognize and reduce their harmful impacts before it is too late. The objective for pioneers on new frontiers should always be maximizing the benefits while minimizing the harms that can be foreseen from the very beginning instead of looking back with anger after the damage is done.

We have that opportunity with Smart City initiatives today.

Because they concentrate many of the choices that will have to be made when we boldly dare to claim the future of America again, I’ve been looking for a roadmap through the moral thicket in the books and articles that are being written about these initiatives today. Here are some of the markers that I’ve discovered.

Human priorities, realized with the help of technology

1.         Markers on the Road to Smarter and More Vibrant Communities

The following insights come almost entirely from a short article by Robert Kitchin, a professor at Maynooth University in Ireland. In my review of the on-going conversation about Smart Cities, I found him to be one of its most helpful observers.  

In his article, Kitchin discusses the three principal ways that smart cities are understood, the key promises smart initiatives make to stakeholders, and the perils to be avoided around these promises.

Perhaps not surprisingly, people envision cities and other communities “getting smarter” in different ways. One constituency sees an opportunity to improve both “urban regulation and governance through instrumentation and data-driven systems”–essentially, a management tool. A bolder and more transformative vision sees information and communication technology “re-configur[ing] human capital, creativity, innovation, education, sustainability, and management,” thereby “produc[ing] smarter citizens, workers and public servants” who “can enact polic[ies], produce better products… foster indigenous entrepreneurship and attract inward investment.” The first makes the frontier operate more efficiently while the second improves nearly every corner of it.

The third Smart City vision is “a counter-weight or alternative” to each of them. It wants these technologies “to promote a citizen-centric model of development that fosters social innovation and social justice, civic engagement and hactivism, and transparent and accountable governance.” In this model, technology serves social objectives like greater equality and fairness. Kitchin reminds us that these three visions are not mutually exclusive. It seems to me that the priorities embedded in a community’s vision of a “smarter” future could include elements of each of them, functioning like checks and balances, in tension with one another. 

Smart City initiatives promise to solve pressing urban problems, including poor economic performance; government dysfunction; constrained mobility; environmental degradation; a declining quality of life, including risks to safety and security; and a disengaged, unproductive citizen base. Writes Kitchin:

the smart city promises to solve a fundamental conundrum of cities – how to reduce costs and create economic growth and resilience at the same time as producing sustainability and improving services, participation and quality of life – and to do so in commonsensical, pragmatic, neutral and apolitical ways.

Once again, it’s a delicate balancing act with a range of countervailing interests and constituencies, as you can see in the chart from a related discussion above.
 
The perils of Smart Cities should never overwhelm their promise in my view, but urban pioneers should always have them in mind (from planning through implementation) because some perils only manifest themselves over time. According to Kitchin, the seven dangers in pursuing these initiatives include:
 
–taking “a ‘one size fits all’ approach, treating cities as generic markets and solutions [that are] straightforwardly scalable and movable”;
 
–assuming that initiatives are “objective and non-ideological, grounded in either science or commonsense.” You can aim for these ideals, but human and organizational preferences and biases will always be embedded within them.
 
–believing that the complex social problems in communities can be reduced to “neatly defined technical problems” that smart technology can also solve. The ways that citizens have always framed and resolved their community problems cannot be automated so easily. (This is also the thrust of Ben Green’s Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, which will be published by MIT Press in April. In it he argues for “smart enough alternatives” that are attainable with the help of technology but never reducible to technology solutions alone.)
 
–engaging with corporations that are using smart city technologies “to capture government functions as new market opportunities.” One risk of a company like Google to communities like Toronto’s is that Google might lock Toronto in to its proprietary technologies and vendors over a long period of time or use Toronto’s citizen data to gain business opportunities in other cities.
 
–becoming straddled with “buggy, brittle and hackable” systems that are ever more “complicated, interconnected and dependent on software” while becoming more resistant to manual fixes.
 
–becoming victimized by “pervasive dataveillance that erodes privacy” through practices like “algorithmic social sorting (whether people get a loan, a tenancy, a job, etc), dynamic pricing (whereby different people pay varying prices depending on their perceived customer value) and anticipatory governance using predictive profiling (wherein data precedes how a person is policed and governed).” Earlier this month, my post on popular on-line games like Fortnite highlighted the additional risk that invasive technologies can use the data they are gathering to change peoples’ behavior.
 
-and lastly, reinforcing existing power structures and inequalities instead of eroding or reconfiguring them.
 
While acknowledging the promise of Smart Cities at their best, Kitchin closes his article with this cautionary note:

the realities of implementation are messier and more complex than the marketing hype of corporations or city managers portray and there are a number of social, political, ethical and legal concerns with respect to the kind of society smart city initiatives seek to create.  As such, whilst networked urbanism has benefits, it also poses challenges and risks that are often little explored or legislated for ahead of implementation. Indeed, the pace of development and rollout of smart city technologies is proceeding well ahead of wider reflection, critique and regulation.

Putting the cart before a suitably-designed horse is a problem with all new and seductive technologies that get embraced before their harms are identified or can be addressed—a quandary that was also considered here in a post called “Looking Out for the Human Side of Technology.”

2.         The Value of Our Data

A few additional considerations about the Smart City are also worth bearing in mind as debate about these initiatives intensifies.

In a March 8, 2019 post, Kurtis McBride wrote about two different ways “to value” the data that these initiatives will produce, and his distinction is an important one. It’s a discussion that citizens, government officials and tech companies should be having, but unfortunately are not having as much as they need to.

When Smart City data is free to everyone, there is the risk that the multinationals generating it will merely use it to increase their power and profits in the growing market for Smart City technologies and services. From the residents’ perspective, McBride argues that it’s “reasonable for citizens to expect to see benefit” from their data, while noting that these same citizens will also be paying dearly for smart upgrades to their communities. His proposal on valuing citizen data depends on how it will be used by tech companies like Google or local service providers. For example, if citizen data is used:

to map the safest and fastest routes for cyclists across the city and offers that information free to all citizens, [the tech company] is providing citizen benefit and should be able to access the needed smart city data free of charge. 
 
But, if a courier company uses real-time traffic data to optimize their routes, improving their productivity and profit margins – there is no broad citizen benefit. In those cases, I think it’s fair to ask those organizations to pay to access the needed city data, providing a revenue stream cities can then use to improve city services for all. 

Applying McBride’s reasoning, an impartial body in a city like Toronto would need to decide whether Google has to pay for data generated in its Quayside community by consulting a benefit-to-citizens standard. Clearly, if Google wanted to use Quayside data in a Smart City initiative in say Colorado or California, it would need to pay Toronto for the use of its citizens’ information.
 
Of course, addressing the imbalance between those (like us) who provide the data and the tech companies that use it to increase their profits and influence is not just a problem for Smart City initiatives, and changing the “value proposition” around our data is surely part of the solution. In her new book Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human Future in the New Frontier of Power, Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff says that “you’re the product if these companies aren’t paying you for your data” does not state the case powerfully enough. She argues that the big tech platforms are like elephant poachers and our personal data like those elephants’ ivory tusks. “You are not the product,” she writes. “You are the abandoned carcass.”
 
Smart City initiatives also provide a way to think about “the value of our data” in the context of our living and working and not merely as the gateway to more convenient shopping, more addictive gaming experiences or  “free” search engines like Googles’.

This post is adapted from my March 24, 2019 newsletter. Subscribe today and receive an email copy of future posts in your inbox each week.

Whose Values Will Save Us From Our Technology?

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When travelers visited indigenous people in remote places, they often had problems when they took out their cameras and wanted to take some pictures. The locals frequently turned away, in what was later explained as a fear of having their souls stolen by the camera’s image. 

After all, who wants to let a stranger take your soul away? 

Indigenous people have an interesting relationship between their experience and their representations of it. The pictures here are of embroideries made by the Kuna people who live on remote islands off the coast of Panama. I don’t know what these abstractions mean to the Kuna, but I thought they might stand in here for representations of something that’s essential to them, like their souls.

Technology today is probing—with the aim of influencing, for both good and bad purposes—the most human and vital parts of us. For years, the alarm bells have been going off about the impact on our kids of video games (and more recently their on-line multi-player successors), because kids are really “each of us” at our most impressionable.  Unlike many indigenous people however, most kids are blissfully unaware that somebody might be stealing something from them or that their behavior is being modified while they are busy having fun.  And it’s not just kids today who become engaged and vulnerable to those behind their screens whenever they’re playing, shopping or exploring on-line.

Because of their ability to engage and distract, the tightly controlled environments of on-line games provide behavioral scientists and the others who are watching us play them a near perfect Petri dish in which to study the choices we make in the game’s virtual world and how they can influence them. As a result of the data being gathered, the “man behind the curtain” has become increasingly adroit at deepening our engagement, anticipating our behavior once we’re “on the hook,” manipulating what we do next, and ensuring that we stay involved in the game as long as he wants us to.

Games benefit their hosts by selling stuff to players, mostly through ads and marketing play-related gear. Game hosts are also selling the behavioral information they gather from players. Their playbook is the same as Facebook’s:  monetizing behavioral data about its users by selling that data to whoever wants to influence our decision-making in all aspects of our lives and work.

When it comes to gathering particularly rich pools of behavioral data, two games today are noteworthy. Fortnite has become one of the most successful games in history in what seems like a matter of months, while Tetris, one of the first on-line games, has recently been updated for an even wider demographic. This week’s stories about them illustrate the potency of their interactions with players; the precision of the existing behavioral data that these games have utilized; the even more refined behavioral data they are currently gathering on players; and the risks of addiction and other harms to the humans who are playing them.

These stories amount to a cautionary tale, affecting not just the games we play but all of our screen-facing experiences. Are we, as citizens of the enlightened, freedom-loving West, equipped to “save our souls” from these aspiring puppet-masters or is the paternalistic, more harmony-seeking East (particularly China with its great firewalls and social monitors) finding better solutions? It’s actually a fairly simple question— 

Whose values will save us from our technology?

1.            The Rise of Fortnite and Tetris

Five years or an on-line lifetime ago, I wrote about “social benefit games” like WeTopia, wondering whether they could enable us to exercise our abilities to act in “pro-social” or good ways on-line before we went out to change the world. I also worried at the time about the eavesdroppers behind our screens who were studying us while we did so.
 
I heralded their enabling quality, their potential for helping us to behave better, in a post called Game Changer:

The repetitive activities in this virtual world didn’t feel like rote learning because the over-and-over-again was embedded in the diversions of what was, at least at the front end, only a game. Playing it came with surprises  (blinking “opportunities” and “limited time offers”), cheerful reminders (to water my “giving tree” or harvest my carrots), and rewards from all of the “work” I was doing (the “energy,” “experience,” and “good will” credits I kept racking up by remembering to restock Almanzo’s store or to grow my soccer-playing community of friends).

What I’m wondering is whether this kind of immersive on-line experience can change real world behavior.
 
We assume that the proverbial rat in this maze will learn how to press the buzzer with his little paw when the pellets keep coming.
 
Will he (or she) become even more motivated if he can see that a fellow rat, outside his maze, also gets pellets every time he presses his buzzer?
 
And what happens when he leaves the maze?
 
Is this really a way to prepare the shock troops needed to change the world?

In a second post, I looked at what “the man behind the curtain” was doing while the game’s players were learning how to become better people:

He’s a social scientist who has never had more real time information about how and why people behave in the ways that they do (not ever!) than he can gather today by watching hundreds, sometimes even millions of us play these kinds of social games.
 
Why you did one thing and not another. What activities attracted you and which ones didn’t. What set of circumstances got you to use your credit card, or to ask your friends to give you a hand, or to play for 10 hours instead of just 10 minutes.
 
There’s a lot for that man to learn because, quite frankly, we never act more naturally or in more revealing ways than when we’re at play.

In my last post back then, I concluded that there were both upsides and downsides to these kinds of on-line game experiences and agreed to keep an open mind. I still think so, but am far more pessimistic about the downsides today than I was all those years ago. 
 
Fortnite may be the most widely played on-line game ever.  As a hunt/kill your enemies/celebrate your victories kind of adventure, it is similar to hundreds of other on-line offerings. Like them, it has also drawn far more boys than girls as players. What distinguishes the Fortnite experience is the behavioral data that has informed it.
 
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, “How Fortnite Triggered an Unwinnable War Between Parents and Their Boys,” the game’s success is due to the incorporation of existing behavioral data in its base programming and simultaneous machine learning while the game is afoot. Dr Richard Freed, psychologist and author of “Wired Child: Reclaiming Childhood in a Digital Age” says that Fortnite has combined so many “persuasive design elements” (around 200) that it is the talk among his peers. “Something is really different about it,” he said.
 
Ofir Turel who teaches at Cal State Fullerton and researches the effects of social media and gaming, talked about one of those persuasive design elements, namely how Fortnite players experience the kind of random and unpredictable rewards that keep their casino counterparts glued to their seats for hours in front of their slot machines. (Fifty years ago, behaviorist B.F. Skinner found that variable, intermittent rewards were more effective than a predictable pattern of rewards in shaping the habit-forming behavior of pigeons.) “When you follow a reward system that’s not fixed, it messes up our brains eventually,” said Turel. With games like Fortnite, he continues: “We’re all pigeons in a big human experiment.”
 
The impact of these embedded and evolving forms of persuasion were certainly compelling for the boys who are profiled in this article. Toby is a representative kid who wants to play all of the time and whose behavior seems to have changed as a result:

Toby is ‘typically a nice kid,’ his mother said. He is sweet, articulate, creative, precocious and headstrong—the kind of child who can be a handful but whose passion and curiosity could well drive him to greatness. [In other words, the perfect Wall Street Journal reader’s pre-teen.]
 
Turn off Fortnite [however], and he can scream, yell and call his parents names. Toby gets so angry that his parents impose ‘cooling off’ periods of as long as two weeks. His mother said he becomes less aggressive during those times. The calming effect wears off after Fortnite returns.
 
Toby’s mother has tried to reason with him. She has also threatened boarding school. ‘We’re not emotionally equipped to live like this,’ she tells him. ‘This is too intense for the other people living here.’

Of course, it could be years before psychologists and other researchers study larger samples of boys playing Fortnite and report their findings.
 
In the meantime, there was also a story about Tetris in the newspapers this week. Some of you may remember the game from the era of Pokeman. (Essentially, you attempt to navigate blocks or clusters of blocks into the spaces in a container on the screen below, where you drop them in.)  How could a simple, time consuming, 1980’s era diversion like this be harmful, you ask? This time it seems to embed an endless desire for distraction instead of aggression.
 
A 1994 article in Wired magazine identified something called “the Tetris Effect.” Long after they had played the game, many players reported seeing floating blocks in their minds or imaging real-life objects fitting together. At the time, Wired suggested that the game’s effect on the brain made it a kind of “electronic drug” or “pharmatronic.” The random sample of players in this week’s article added further descriptors to the Tetris Effect.   
 
One player named Becky Noback says:

You get the dopamine rush from stacking things up in a perfect order and having them disappear—all that classic Tetris satisfaction. It’s like checking off a to-do list. It gives you this sense of accomplishment.

Another player, Jeremy Ricci, says:

When everything’s clicking, and you’re dropping your pieces, you get into this trancelike rhythm. It’s hard to explain, but when you’re in virtual-reality mode, there’s things going beneath you, and to the side of you, and the music changes, and you’re getting all those elements at the same time, you get a surreal experience.

The article recounts that a Twitter search of both “Tetris Effect” and “cry” or  “tears” will uncover tweets where players are wondering: “Why am I tearing up during a Tetris game?” testifying to the game’s deep emotional resonance. Reviewers of the newest version of the game (out in December) have also called it “spiritual,” “transcendental,” and “an incredible cosmic journey.”
 
What is prompting these reactions? While the basic game is the same as ever, the newest version surrounds the block-dropping action with fantastical environments, ambient new age music, and, occasionally, a soothing lyric like “what could you be afraid of?” Add virtual reality goggles, and a player can float in space surrounded by stars while luminescent jellyfish flutter by and mermaids morph into dolphins. When a player drops in his or her blocks, the audio pulses gently and the hand-held controller vibrates.  While the new version of the game may seem aimed at seekers of “trippy experiences,” in fact it is being marketed as an immersive stress-relieving diversion. It is here where Tetris aims for a market beyond the usually game-playing crowd, which skews younger and more male. (Think of all those new pigeons!). Almost everyone wants a stress reliever after all.
 
You can see a preview of the new Tetris for yourself (with or without your virtual reality headsets) via this link.
 
These early assessments of Fortnite and Tetris only provide anecdotal evidence, but we seem to be entering a strange new world where a game’s interface and those gathering information and manipulating our behavior behind it have taken over more of our attention, healthy detachment, and ability to think for ourselves.

Another one from the Kuna people, San Blas Islands, Panama

2.            Go East or Go West?

In “Fortnite Addiction: China Has the Answer,” David Mattin discusses China’s assessment of the problem, the solution that its social monitors are implementing today, and why their approach just might make sense for us too. Mattin is the Global Head of Trends and Insights (a great job title!) at TrendWatching and sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council. He put up his provocative post on Medium recently.

It’s been widely reported that China is rolling out what Mattin calls “an unprecedented, tech-fueled experiment in surveillance and social control.” Under this system, citizens are assigned a “social credit rating” that scores each citizen’s worth as a citizen.  It is a system that seems shocking to us in the West, but it follows centuries of maintaining a social order based on respect for elders (from the “celestial kingdom of rulers” on down) and a quest for harmony in the community as a whole.  The Chinese government intends to have a compulsory rating system in place nationwide by 2020. Individuals with low social credit scores have already been denied commercial loans, building permits and school admissions. Mattin reports that low scorers have also been blocked from taking 11.4 million flights and 4.2 million train rides. This system is serious about limiting personal freedoms for the sake of collective well being.  

Like many of us, China’s monitors have become alarmed by reports of Fortnite addiction and Tencent, the world’s sixth largest internet company, recently started using camera-enabled facial recognition technology to restrict the amount of time that young people play a multi-player video game called Honor of Kings that’s similar to Fortnite.  As in the West, the concern is about the impact of these gaming technologies on young people’s developing brains and life prospects.

Under government pressure, Tencent first trialled the new system back in October. Now they’ve announced they’ll implement facial recognition-based age restrictions on all their games in 2019. Under 12s will be locked out after one hour per day; 13–18-year olds are allowed two hours. And here’s the crucial detail: the system is fuelled by the national citizen database held by China’s Ministry of Public Security. Yes, if you’re playing Honor of Kings in China now, you’re being watched via your webcam or phone camera and checked against a vast government database of headshots.

Because we can’t imagine it happening here doesn’t mean it’s the wrong approach, and in the most interesting part of his argument, Mattin partially explains why.
 
He begins with the observation that priorities in Chinese society and the trade-offs they’re making are different—something that’s hard (if not impossible) for most of us Westerners, overtaken by our feelings of superiority, to understand.  
 
– “Enlightenment liberal values are not  the only way to produce a successful society” and 
 
– “value judgments are trade-offs; you can have a bit more of one good if you tolerate having a bit less of another.”
 
Indeed, it is how all ethical systems work; some values are always more important than others in decision-making. Mattin drives his point home this way:

What western liberal democrats have never had to countenance seriously is the idea that theirs are not the only values mandated by reason and morality; that they’re not the universal end point of history and the destination for all successful societies. In fact, they’re just some values among many others that are equally valid. And choosing between ultimate values is always a case of trading some off against others.

Mattin rubs it in even further with an uncomfortable truth and a question for additional pondering.  
 
For us, as the supposed champions of freedom and the rights of every individual, the uncomfortable truth is that every single day “we’re actively deciding (albeit unconsciously) that we hold other values — such as convenience and distraction — above that of individual liberty.” So it is not really government interference with our freedoms that we reject; it is anyone else’s right to interfere with our convenience or right to be distracted as much as we want anytime that we want. Of course, I’ve been making a similar argument when urging that new restraints be placed on tech giants like Facebook, Amazon and Google. However uncomfortable it is to hear, our insatiable desires for convenience and distraction are simply not more important than preventing the harms these companies are causing to our political process, privacy rights, and competitive markets. Even so, in the U.S. at least, we seem to making very little progress in any of these areas because we supposedly stand for freedom.
 
Mattin’s what-if question to mull over is as follows. What if the evidence mounts that excessive screen time playing games and otherwise really is damaging young people’s (or maybe everyone’s) minds and that China’s government-imposed time restrictions really do limit the damage? How will the West respond to “the spectacle of a civilisation founded on a very different package of values — but one that can legitimately claim to promote human flourishing more vigorously than their own”?

3.            Whose Values Should Help Us To Decide?

I have a few additional questions of my own.
 
If empowering a Big Brother (or Sister) like China’s in the West is unpalatable, how can a distracted public that is preoccupied by its conveniences be roused enough to counter tech-related harms with democratically determined cures?
 
Do we need to be confronted by an epidemic of anti-social gamers before we act?  Since an epidemic of opioid addiction and “deaths of despair” hasn’t roused the citizenry (or its elected representatives) to initiate a meaningful response, why would it be any different here?
 
Even if we had The Will to pursue solutions, could safety nets ever be put into place quickly enough to protect the generations that are playing Fortnite, Tetris and other games today? After all, democracy is cumbersome, time-consuming.
 
And continuing this thought, can democratic governments ever hope to “catch up to” and protect their citizens from rapidly evolving and improving technologies with troubling human impacts? Won’t the men and women behind our screens always be ahead of a non-authoritarian government’s ability to constrain them?
 
I hope you’ll let me know what you think the answers might be.

This post is adapted from my March 3, 2019 newsletter.

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