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April 23, 2018: Columbia Business School prof. Len Sherman on business models online

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This week: Columbia Business School professor Len Sherman on the effect of business models in our online experience.

Pointers to Len's work:

• If You're In A Dogfight, Become A Cat, by Len Sherman, on Indiebound

• Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook's Mess? and Why Facebook Will Never Change Its Business Model, recent Forbes.com columns

• Len on Twitter: @lenshermanCBS

• Len's homepage

...but first, as usual, we'll start with tech news:



Recent News

• Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match, by Amanda Taub and Max Fisher in the NYT. “Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the newsfeed — the primary portal for news and information for many users — unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and governments find themselves with little leverage over the company. Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot real-world attacks. ... ‘You report to Facebook, they do nothing,’ one of the researchers, Amalini De Sayrah, said. ‘There’s incitements to violence against entire communities and Facebook says it doesn’t violate community standards.’”

• Jaron Lanier speaking about Facebook and Google as “behavior modification empires” that “rely on behavior modification and spying” for their business models. It’s cheaper to pay them to ruin things than to make positive change. Perhaps, Lanier says, it’s time for subscription fees. (Hey, it worked for HBO and Netflix!) “I don’t believe our species can survive unless we fix this,” Lanier concludes. “In the meantime, if the companies won’t change, delete your accounts.”

• Interview with Jaron Lanier in New York Magazine: “A lot of the rhetoric of Silicon Valley that has the utopian ring about creating meaningful communities where everybody’s creative and people collaborate and all this stuff — I don’t wanna make too much of my own contribution, but I was kind of the first author of some of that rhetoric a long time ago. So it kind of stings for me to see it misused. Like, I used to talk about how virtual reality could be a tool for empathy, and then I see Mark Zuckerberg talking about how VR could be a tool for empathy while being profoundly nonempathic, using VR to tour Puerto Rico after the storm, after Maria. One has this feeling of having contributed to something that’s gone very wrong.”

• Techno-Fundamentalism Can’t Save You, Mark Zuckerberg, by UVA professor Siva Vaidhyanathan

• The New Octopus, by K. Sabeel Rahman in Logic mag.

• Who Has More of Your Personal Data Than Facebook? Try Google, writes Christopher Mims in the WSJ. More on Google soon...



For our sing along tonight:

Building a surveillance state
Google, Google
Privacy is what they hate
All Google day

It's Facebook, too
They're spying on you
We've got to change before it's too late
All Google day

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