On September 18, the British Channel 4 ran a news segment with the headline, ‘Potentially deadly bomb ingredients are ‘frequently bought together’ on Amazon.’
.. The real story in this mess is not the threat that algorithms pose to Amazon shoppers, but the threat that algorithms pose to journalism. By forcing reporters to optimize every story for clicks, not giving them time to check or contextualize their reporting, and requiring them to race to publish follow-on articles on every topic, the clickbait economics of online media encourage carelessness and drama. This is particularly true for technical topics outside the reporter’s area of expertise.
And reporters have no choice but to chase clicks. Because Google and Facebook have a duopoly on online advertising, the only measure of success in publishing is whether a story goes viral on social media. Authors are evaluated by how individual stories perform online, and face constant pressure to make them more arresting. Highly technical pieces are farmed out to junior freelancers working under strict time limits. Corrections, if they happen at all, are inserted quietly through ‘ninja edits’ after the fact.
There is no real penalty for making mistakes, but there is enormous pressure to frame stories in whatever way maximizes page views. Once those stories get picked up by rival news outlets, they become ineradicable. The sheer weight of copycat coverage creates the impression of legitimacy. As the old adage has it, a lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is pulling its boots on.
Earlier this year, when the Guardian published an equally ignorant (and far more harmful) scare piece about a popular secure messenger app, it took a group of security experts six months of cajoling and pressure to shame the site into amending its coverage. And the Guardian is a prestige publication, with an independent public editor. Not every story can get such editorial scrutiny on appeal, or attract the sympathetic attention of Teen Vogue.
The very machine learning systems that Channel 4’s article purports to expose are eroding online journalism’s ability to do its job.
Moral panics like this one are not just harmful to musket owners and model rocket builders. They distract and discredit journalists, making it harder to perform the essential function of serving as a check on the powerful.
The real story of machine learning is not how it promotes home bomb-making, but that it’s being deployed at scale with minimal ethical oversight, in the service of a business model that relies entirely on psychological manipulation and mass surveillance. The capacity to manipulate people at scale is being sold to the highest bidder, and has infected every aspect of civic life, including democratic elections and journalism.
Together with climate change, this algorithmic takeover of the public sphere is the biggest news story of the early 21st century.
Reddit: Amazon needs a new HQ because it can’t convince people to move to Seattle
Meet Me in St. Louis, Bezos
If Donald Trump were the deal making, industrial-policy president that he once promised to be, he would be on the phone with Jeff Bezos right now, making a case along these very lines — while hinting, broadly and of course nonthreateningly (har, har), at the political benefits of opening Amazon St. Louis or Amazon Detroit, of being seen as a company that renews cities and doesn’t just put brick and mortar out of business.
.. But when you enjoy a monopoly’s powers, one way to avoid being regulated like one is to act with a kind pre-emptive patriotism, and behave as though what’s good for America is good for Amazon as well.
Amazon’s 49,000% Gain: The Most ‘Super’ of ‘Superstocks’ Since 1926
only 0.33% of all companies that were part of the U.S. stock market at any point over those nine decades accounted for half of all the wealth generated for investors. And fewer than 1.1% of all the stocks that existed created three-quarters of the stock market’s cumulative dollar gains — as measured relative to the returns on cash.
Without such “superstocks,” as financial adviser William Bernstein has called them, the stock market wouldn’t have been worth owning at all. The 1,000 top performers since 1926 — under 4% of all stocks — account for all the stock market’s gains, Prof. Bessembinder’s research shows. You could have matched the returns of all the other 96% of stocks combined by putting your money in one-month U.S. Treasury bills.
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