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Predictions 2020: Facebook Caves, Google Zags, Netflix Sells Out, and Data Policy Gets Sexy

A new year brings another run at my annual predictions: For 17 years now, I’ve taken a few hours to imagine what might happen over the course of the coming twelve months. And my goodness did I swing for the fences last year — and I pretty much whiffed. Batting .300 is great in the majors, but it kind of sucks compared to my historical average. My mistake was predicting events that I wished would happen. In other words, emotions got in the way. So yes, Trump didn’t leave office, Zuck didn’t give up voting control of Facebook, and weed’s still illegal (on a federal level, anyway). 

Chastened, this year I’m going to focus on less volatile topics, and on areas where I have a bit more on-the-ground knowledge — the intersection of big tech, marketing, media, and data policy. As long time readers know, I don’t prepare in advance of writing this post. Instead, I just clear a few hours and start thinking out loud. So…here we go.

  1. Facebook bans microtargeting on specific kinds of political advertising. Of course I start with Facebook, because, well, it’s one of the most inscrutable companies in the world right now. While Zuck & Co. seem deeply committed to their “principled” stand around a politician’s right to paid prevarication, the pressure to do something will be too great, and as it always does, the company will enact a half-measure, then declare victory. The new policy will probably roll out after Super Tuesday (sparking all manner of conspiracies about how the company didn’t want to impact its Q1 growth numbers in the US). The company’s spinners will frame this as proof they listen to their critics, and that they’re serious about the integrity of the 2020 elections. As with nearly everything it does, this move will fail to change anyone’s opinion of the company. Wall St. will keep cheering the company’s stock, and folks like me will keep wondering when, if ever, the next shoe will drop. 
  2. Netflix opens the door to marketing partnerships. Yes, I’m aware that the smart money has moved on from this idea. But in a nod to increasing competition and the reality of Wall St. expectations, Netflix will at least pilot a program — likely not in the US — where it works with brands in some limited fashion. Mass hysteria in the trade press will follow once this news breaks, but Netflix will call the move a pilot, a test, an experiment…no big deal. It may take the form of a co-produced series, or branded content, or some other “native” approach, but at the end of the day, it’ll be advertising dollars that fuel the programming. And while I won’t predict the program augurs a huge new revenue stream for the company, I can predict that what won’t happen, at least in 2020: A free, advertising-driven version of Netflix. Just not in the company’s culture. 
  3. CDA 230 will get seriously challenged, but in the end, nothing gets done, again. Last year I predicted there’d be no federal data privacy legislation, and I’m predicting the same for this year. However, there will be a lot of movement on legislation related to the tech oligarchy. The topic that will come the closest to passage will be a revision to CDA 230 —the landmark legislation that protects online platforms from liability for user generated content. Blasphemy? Sure, but here we are, stuck between free speech on the one hand, massive platform economics on the other, and a really, really bad set of externalities in the middle. CDA 230 was built to give early platforms the room to grow unhindered by traditional constraints on media companies. That growth has now metastasized, and we don’t have a policy response that anyone agrees upon. And CDA 230 is an easy target, given conservatives in Congress already believe Facebook, Google, and others have it out for their president. They’ll be a serious run at rewriting 230, but it will ultimately fail. Related…
  4. Adversarial interoperability will get a moment in the sun, but also fail to make it into law. In the past I (and many others) have written about “machine readable data portability.” But for the debate we’re about to have (and need to have), I like “adversarial interoperability” better. Both are mouthfuls, and neither are easy to explain. Data governance and policy are complicated topics which test our society’s ability to have difficult long form conversations. 2020 will be a year where the legions of academics, policy makers, politicians, and writers who debate economic theory around data and capitalism get a real audience, and I believe much of that debate will center on whether or not large platforms have a responsibility to be open or closed. As Cory Doctorow explains, adversarial interoperability is “when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them.” As in, I can plug my new e-commerce engine into Amazon, my new mobile operating system into iOS, my new social network into Facebook, or my new driving instruction app into Google Maps. I grew up in a world where this kind of innovation was presumed. It’s now effectively banned by a handful of data oligarchs, and our economy – and our future – suffers for it. 
  5. As long as we’re geeking out on catchphrases only a dork can love, 2020 will also be the year “data provenance” becomes a thing. As with many nerdy topics, the concept of data provenance started in academia, migrated to adtech, and is about to break into the broader world of marketing, which is struggling to get its arms around a data-driven future. The ability to trace the origin, ownership, permissions, and uses of data is a fundamental requirement of an advanced digital economy, and in 2020, we’ll realize we have a ton of work left to do to get this right. Yes, yes, blockchain and ledgers are part of the discussion here, but the point isn’t the technology, it’s the policy enabling the technology. 
  6. Google zags. Saddled with increasingly negative public opinion and driven in large part by concerns over retaining its workforce, Google will make a deeply surprising and game changing move in 2020. It could be a massive acquisition, a move into some utterly surprising new industry (like content), but my money’s on something related to data privacy. The company may well commit to both leading the debate on the topics described above, as well as implementing them in its core infrastructure. Now that would really be a zag…
  7. At least one major “on demand” player will capitulate. Gig economy business models may make sense long term, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting the execution right in the first group of on demand “unicorns.” In fact, I’d argue we’re mostly getting them wrong, even if as consumers, we love the supposed convenience gig brands bring us. Many of the true costs of these businesses have been externalized onto public infrastructure (and the poor), and civic patience is running out. Plus, venture and public finance markets are increasingly skeptical of business models that depend on strip mining the labor of increasingly querulous private contractors. A reckoning is due, and in 2020 we’ll see the collapse of one or more larger players in the field.
  8. Influencer marketing will fall out of favor. I’m not predicting an implosion here, but rather an industry wide pause as brands start to ask the questions consumers will also be pondering: who the fuck are these influencers and why are we paying them so much attention? A major piece of this — on the marketing side anyway — will be driven by a massive increase in influencer fraud. As with other fast growing digital marketing channels, where money pours in, fraud fast follows — nearly as fast as fawning New York Times articles, but I digress. 
  9. Information warfare becomes a national bogeyman. If we’ve learned anything since the 2016 election, it’s this: We’ve taken far too long to comprehend the extent to which bad actors have come to shape and divide our discourse. These past few years have slowly revealed the power of information warfare, and the combination of a national election with the compounding distrust of algorithm-driven platforms will mean that by mid year, “fake news” will yield to “information warfare” as the catchphrase describing what’s wrong with our national dialog. Deep fakes, sophisticated state-sponsored information operations, and good old fashioned political info ops will dominate the headlines in 2020. Unfortunately, the cynic in me thinks the electorate’s response will be to become more inured and distrustful, but there’s a chance a number of trusted media brands (both new and old) prosper as we all search for a common set of facts.
  10. Purpose takes center stage in business. 2019 was the year the leaders of industry declared a new purpose for the corporation — one that looks beyond profits for a true north that includes multiple stakeholders, not just shareholders. 2020 will be the year many companies will compete to prove that they are serious about that pledge. Reaction from Wall St. will be mixed, but I expect plenty of CEOs will feel emboldened to take the kind of socially minded actions that would have gotten them fired in previous eras. This is a good thing, and likely climate change will become the issue many companies will feel comfortable rallying behind. (I certainly hope so, but this isn’t supposed to be about what I wish for…)
  11. Apple and/or Amazon stumble. I have no proof as to why I think this might happen but…both these companies just feel ripe for some kind of major misstep or scandal. America loves a financial winner — and both Amazon and Apple have been runaway winners in the stock market for the past decade. Both have gotten away with some pretty bad shit along the way, especially when it comes to labor practices in their supply chain. And while neither of them are as vulnerable as Facebook or Google when it comes to the data privacy or free speech issues circling big tech, both Apple and Amazon have become emblematic of a certain kind of capitalism that feels fraught with downside risk in the near future. I can’t say what it is, but I feel like both these companies could catch one squarely on the jaw this coming year, and the post-mortems will all say they never saw it coming. 

So there you have it — 11 predictions for the coming year. I was going to stop at 10, but that Apple/Amazon one just forced itself out — perhaps that’s me wishing again. We’ll see. Let me know your thoughts, and keep your cool out there. 2020 is going to be one hell of a year. 

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Predictions Review: Trump, Zuck Crush My Optimism In 2019

This past year, I predicted the fall of both Zuck and Trump, not to mention the triumph of cannabis and rationale markets. But in 2019, the sociopaths won – bigly.

Damn, was I wrong.

One year ago this week, I sat down to write my annual list of ten or so predictions for the coming twelve months. And before I was even halfway through, I’d already listed and then summarily dismissed the two most significant American sociopaths of our generation.

Despite my glancing protestations (#2 and #4, below), Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump did not go gently into the good night of 2019. And believing they might have only proves both my naiveté and our collective challenge: If we truly want a better world, we need to reform not just the technology industry, but the steroid-fueled version of capitalism that has captured it. If I’ve learned anything from this annual process of critically reviewing my predictions, it’s this: the fusion of unrestrained capitalism with unaccountable technology has become the playground of sociopaths. And this past year, the best sociopaths won. Bigly.

And while I’m tempted to pen a rant pointing out the eerie similarities between Zuck and Trump’s character, ascendance, and current chokehold on power, I’ll leave that for another day (though as a teaser, you really should watch this clip, especially the last few seconds…). Over the past 16 years, this post has evolved into a rather light-hearted scorecard, after all. Forgive me if I’m in a grimmer mood as we get started. But I did pick a doozy for my first prediction last year:

1/ Global warming gets really, really, really real. Honestly, I don’t know how anyone could argue 2019 was exactly the year things got way, way too real. Given my American bias and unforgiveable (if twisted) optimism, I predicted we’d have some kind of a Hurricane Sandy like event that slapped some sense into the United States. While that didn’t exactly happen (we got lucky with Dorian and others, though the Bahamas certainly didn’t), there were so many terrifying climate-related news events in 2019, it’s impossible to imagine 2019 as anything other than a turning point in the climate change narrative. First off, we had the single largest set of mass protests on any issue, ever – and of course, Greta Thurnberg as Time’s person of the year (which of course our president mercilessly and predictably mocked). We had news that the Arctic’s permafrost is melting, releasing a vicious cycle of carbon into the atmosphere. Bloomberg counted up our climate disasters in 2019, and found we had at least one every week. We had more devastating fires in California, we had a heat wave in Greenland (and Europe), we had massive waterfalls of melting ice, we had scientists freaking out that their most dire predictions are now looking too conservative. Nearly 10 million people were displaced by climate change in 2019. A huge swath of the Amazon was on fire this past year – spewing yet another continuous torrent of carbon. So yeah, the US was comparatively spared, but damn, things got really, really real this past year. I’m not happy about it, but I think I got this one at least partially right.

2/ Mark Zuckerberg resigns as Chairman of Facebook, and relinquishes his supermajority voting rights. Related, Sheryl Sandberg stays right where she is. Ok, this was one of several predictions where I was really hoping to be right, but as I copped in the introduction, I simply should have known better. 2019 was certainly a year where plenty of tech lords were taken down a notch (see #8 below), but not at Facebook, which saw its stock rally to near record highs. Scandal, fraud, whistling past democracy’s graveyard – none of it mattered in 2019. And no way will a founding CEO get taken down a notch in that scenario, ridiculous governance structures be dammed. Man, did I whiff!

3/ Despite a ton of noise and smoke from DC, no significant federal legislation is signed around how data is managed in the United States. This played out exactly as I predicted. And to be honest, I don’t expect much to come in 2020, either, despite the fulminations of legislators across both parties. Why? See #2, and for that matter, this next doozy…

4/ The Trump show gets cancelled. Nope. Just like Facebook, Trump’s stock is near an all time high – his approval ratings actually increased during the impeachment hearings. This despite the fact that 55% of the American public now wants him out of office. So yes, Trump will still be in power come New Year’s, and that means I was hopelessly wrong. I suppose I could claim some kind of win given the House did cancel his loathsome reality show, but it takes two chambers of Congress to remove a president. Just like Zuck, I’m left realizing that if I want to be more accurate in my predictions, I should stop wishing for things that make sense, but would cost kingmakers either their money or their power. Another whiff.

5/ Cannabis for the win. Yikes. What kind of idiot predicts the federal legalization of cannabis in a world controlled by Trump? This looked promising at mid year, with a number of legislators holding “historic” hearings on the subject. The issue could have gained traction from there, and we might have had a bipartisan bill by the end of the year, had Trump not needed to play to his base as impeachment seized the narrative. So alas, it was not to be. Despite huge support from the American public, Republicans in Congress managed to actually set the movement back, killing common sense legislation that would have unshackled entrepreneurs who are attempting to create a safe and stable industry (caveat: I’m invested in many of them). The fact is, this past year the black market for cannabis kicked the legal market’s ass. Another whiff, and not the kind any of us would enjoy.

6/ China implodes, the world wobbles. Ah, well, this almost happened. All year long, the headlines augured the collapse of China’s potemkin economy, as Trump’s trade war seemed poised to tilt the globe into recession. Here are a few: Beware of Tremors in China’s Commercial Property Market; China’s Inward Tilt Could Cripple It; China’s Yuan Falls Past Key Level of 7 to the Dollar; on and on the headlines went, warning of a China implosion. But it was not to be. I was a year early and 10 trillion dollars short here. Whiff.

7/ 2019 will be a terrible year for financial markets. Lordy. Just. So. Wrong. Again, I bet against a president and a set of market makers utterly set on ensuring their own power. Damn Fool. Whifferoo.

8/ At least one major tech IPO is pulled, the rest disappoint as a class. If nothing else, here’s proof I should stick to my own lanes. Thanks WeWork, for pulling your IPO and proving that at least I’ve still got tech prediction chops. And yes, the rest of the class didn’t do so great either – Slack, Uber, Lyft have all disappointed. There were some bright spots – Pinterest, Zoom and Cloudflare among them. But it wasn’t the year the tech industry had hoped for, by a long shot.

9/ New forms of journalistic media flourish. This one was kind of a ringer – I knew we’d be launching The Recount by summer, and indeed we did. But it was also a proxy for what I hoped would be a resurgence in journalism across the board. And while I can’t prove this statistically, 2019 did feel like a year journalism got some of its mojo back. Non-profit models seemed to strengthen, subscription revenue continues to eclipse advertising at quality outlets like The New York Times, and innovative newsletters like The Hustle and The Skimm prospered. Maybe “flourish” was too optimistic (like most of my 2019 predictions), but at least this one wasn’t a total whiff.

10/A new “social network” emerges by the end of the year. Well, umm…does Tik Tok count?! Not really, at least, not if you read the fine print in my prediction, where I reasoned that private social chat would be the most likely place for new entrants to emerge. And it seems Zuck agreed – announcing in March a “pivot to privacy” focused on group chat that all but destroyed any investment in the space. Later in the year, Automattic, the relatively unknown company whose WordPress platform powers nearly a third of the Internet, bought Tumblr, a once-important gateway drug that later ceded primacy to Twitter and Instagram. The combination set tech hearts aflame with speculation that a Facebook competitor was in the works. But as far as I can tell, no such plans exist. So yeah, we did see important gains for private social chat this past year, but by year’s end, the Valley’s still stuck in Facebook’s grip, and everyone’s still debating if we’ll ever emerge from it. Me, I’m not so optimistic anymore.

And that, friends, caps what is likely the worst year of predictions I’ve ever reviewed. By my count I only got three of ten defensibly correct in 2019, with a couple pushes and five miserable whiffs. Not a good scorecard going into 2020, but hey, at least I learned something. In an era dominated by Trump and Zuck, it’s best to check your optimism before wading into prognostication. But hell, I’ve still got a few days before I plan on writing my predictions for 2020. Irrational optimism is a hard habit to quit. Maybe it’ll make a comeback next year….

Previous predictions:

Predictions 2019

Predictions 2018

2018: How I Did

Predictions 2017

2017: How I Did

Predictions 2016

2016: How I Did

Predictions 2015

2015: How I Did

Predictions 2014

2014: How I Did

Predictions 2013

2013: How I Did

Predictions 2012

2012: How I Did

Predictions 2011

2011: How I Did

Predictions 2010

2010: How I Did

2009 Predictions

2009 How I Did

2008 Predictions

2008 How I Did

2007 Predictions

2007 How I Did

2006 Predictions

2006 How I Did

2005 Predictions

2005 How I Did

2004 Predictions

2004 How I Did

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Tik Tok, Tick Tock…Boom.

Something’s been bugging me about Tik Tok. I’ve almost downloaded it about a dozen times over the past few months. But I always stop short. I don’t have a ton of time (here’s why) so forgive me as I resort to some short form tricks here. To wit:

  1. China employs a breathtaking model of state-driven surveillance.
  2. The US employs a breathtaking model of capitalist surveillance.

We on the same page so far? OK, great.

Now let’s consider Tik Tok, which is a robust combination of the two. Don’t know Tik Tok? Come on, you read Searchblog for God’s sake. Ok, well, fortunately for you, there’s the New York Times. Or…maybe not. I almost threw up in my mouth as I watched the paper of record run through its decades long practice of “Gee, Golly, Isn’t This Shiny New Tech Thing Culturally Significant, and Aren’t We Woke for Noticing It” journalism last weekend. Read it if you must.

Ok. Time for more shorthand.

  1. Tik Tok is owned by a Chinese company.
  2. Tik Tok is addictive, seductive, you can’t look away.
  3. Tik Tok has a Terms of Service and Privacy Policy that reads, for all intents and purposes, a lot like Google, Facebook, Apple, or Amazon’s terms of service (I’m studying these over at Columbia, FWIW). In other words, Tik Tok has standard clickwrap that gives it permission to do pretty much whatever it wants with the information it collects on its users.
  4. Since they’re modeled on the policies of American surveillance capitalism, Tik Tok’s TOS and Privacy Policies state that the company may collect your: Location, email, phone number, browsing history, device information, app and file names on your device, messaging content, full list of your social network connections (should you let it use your Facebook, Twitter, Insta to find your friends, and most do), content preferences, and a shit ton of other information, not to mention any and all third-party information Tik Tok chooses to acquire and append to your profile (that’d be another shit ton, in case you were wondering).
  5. There’s nothing in Tik Tok’s TOS or Privacy Policy that stops it from sending all the information it collects to the Chinese government. In fact, if you read the policies closely, you’ll see this line: “We may disclose information to respond to subpoenas, court orders, legal process, law enforcement requests, legal claims or government inquiries.”
  6. Tik Tok is clearly concerned about anyone noticing any of this – it’s nearly impossible to find stats on how many people use it in the US (though Ad Age leaked a pitch deck recently saying it was “more than 32 million”), and you won’t find the word “China” or “Chinese” in its TOS or Privacy Policy (it used to be there, but…the company wised up).
  7. Just in case you weren’t paying attention, I refer you to #1 above. If you think Tik Tok isn’t sending information to the Chinese government, you’re sweet, but you should stay inside and stick to rotary phones.
  8. Tik Tok is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on US social networks convincing US consumers, in particular kids, to download and use the app. This is fucking brilliant, by the way.
  9. China and the US are in a pitched battle for economic and geopolitical power, and that battle will be won, in large part, based on which country has access to and dominion over consumer data at scale, which will feed machine learning and artificial intelligence systems that will most certainly be weaponized, both economically and geopolitically (there’s simply not time to explain what I mean by that now, but…let’s just say Russian interference in the 2016 election was a hack job compared to what’s afoot now).

So, I just thought I’d point that out. But those videos, they sure are cute, no?

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Why Politics, Why Now?

Last week an email hit my inbox with a simple and powerful sentiment. “I miss your writing,” it said. The person who sent it was a longtime reader of this site.

I miss writing too. But there’s a reason I’ve been quiet here and on other platforms – I wrote a very short post about that earlier this summer. To summarize, last year I decided to take the leap, for the seventh time, and start a company with my dear friend and frequent co-conspirator John Heilemann. John and I have worked on projects for the better part of three decades, but we’d never started a company together. Now we have: Recount Media is an entirely new approach to video about politics. And the truth is, Recount Media not only requires all of my time, it’s also in fields that seem pretty orthogonal to my previous career trajectory.

That reader’s email reminded me: I’ve not really explained the connection between what I “used to do” – write about the impact of tech on society, advise startups, work on boards, start or run tech-related media companies – and what it is I’m doing now. Turns out, the two are deeply connected. Explaining why takes a bit of exposition – hence this longish post. But in short, the idea is this: The tech story is now a political story, and the political story is, well, a mess. I’m motivated by creating companies and media around consequential, messy stories. Tech used to be the biggest and most poorly covered of the bunch. But now, I’m convinced politics holds that honor.

This post is my attempt to tie together my past, rooted mostly in the West Coast technology culture, with my present, now based in New York and focused almost entirely on politics and video. I hope by thinking out loud here, I might help make it make sense for not only you, my readers, but also for myself as I continue on this journey.

On its face it doesn’t make much sense. A guy who has made his living writing – either coding words into posts, or starting companies that, in essence, were word factories (Wired, The Standard, Federated Media, etc.) – is now co-founder of a company that makes only video. A guy who has specialized in reporting on and sense making around technology is now deep in the utterly foreign world (for me, anyway) of politics. What gives?

I realized that the tech story had morphed into something else back in 2015, when I was running an events business called NewCo. To support that business, I decided to create a small publication focused on the intersection of technology, policy, and business. We called it Shift. To launch that brand, I wrote “The Tech Story Is Over,” a framework of sorts for why I thought the biggest story in our economy had moved from “tech” to the wholesale reinvention of capitalism. From that piece:

Tech hasn’t gone mainstream — it is the mainstream. It’s our cultural dowser, our lens for interpreting an increasingly complex society.Our new cultural heroes are Internet billionaires; our newly minted college graduates all want to start tech companies.

All of which leaves me wondering : What’s the next big story on the horizon, the narrative most people are missing that will shape our future just as technology did for the past 30 years?

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Introducing Recount Media

More than a few of you have been wondering why I’ve been so quiet here these past few months, and today I can finally reveal at least part of what’s kept me so busy. Today we’re announcing a public beta product from the company I’ve been building with my longtime friend and collaborator John Heilemann and many other talented folks. We’re starting with an email newsletter featuring a new approach to video journalism covering political news. I’ll have more to say soon, but for now, sign up here for our first product, The Recount. I hope you’ll share with friends—and let me know what you think. More soon, I promise, and thanks for reading. (CNN coverage here).

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Halfway Through: How Are My Predictions 2019 Shaping Up?

I like to keep myself honest when it comes to predictions. Now that six months of 2019 are in the books (well, nearly seven given how intermittent my postings have been this year), it’s time to see how things are tracking.

Regular readers may have noticed I’m not really written much this year. This pains me, but it’s because I’ve been deep in a new project, one focused on a new market and a new media format. There’ll be news on that soon enough, but for now, let’s review my 2019 predictions and see how I’m doing.

First up: 1/ Global warming gets really, really, really real.  I predicted that 2019 would be the year that climate change would become impossible to ignore. I’m writing this as more than half the country is suffering from a massive heat wave, and in the first six months of the year, we’ve seen so many extreme weather events, it’s hard to keep track. Floods, draught, monsoons, tornados, the Green New Deal, you name it, it’s all over the news. I think we’re on track for this one, sadly.

#2: Mark Zuckerberg resigns as Chairman of Facebook, and relinquishes his supermajority voting rights. Related, Sheryl Sandberg stays right where she is. Well, so far, not happening. There have been many calls for exactly this, including a shareholder revolt that went nowhere. There’s still time, but this isn’t trending in the right direction.

#3: Despite a ton of noise and smoke from DC, no significant federal legislation is signed around how data is managed in the United States. This is trending exactly where I thought it would be. Lots and lots of smoke, no fire whatsoever.

#4: The Trump show gets cancelled.  Wishful thinking, but so far, not happening. But there’s still time, and I expect the Fall to be quite eventful. And who knows what might come of “Mueller Day” this coming week…

#5: Cannabis for the win. I predicted federal legalization, and while there have been some milestones this year, and many are talking about making it happen, I think I was overconfident here. It’s going to take longer than any of us would like.

#6: China implodes, the world wobbles. If you read the Wall St. Journal, you’d have thought this has already happened. The signs are all there, and I think it’s still entirely possible this will occur this Fall.

#7: 2019 will be a terrible year for financial markets. So far I’ve been utterly wrong. It’s been a great year for stocks! But I think we’re at peak market and most indicators point to…bad news ahead. Trump, of course, will pull every lever he can – including bullying the Fed and claiming victory in his various trade wars – but I think we’re overdue for a correction. Again, let’s wait for the Fall to see what comes of this one.

#8: At least one major tech IPO is pulled, the rest disappoint as a class. Several tech IPOs have been pulled, but none of the bellwethers have been yanked. Uber was a disappointment, but overall, 2019 has been a great year for tech IPOs. The year is not over, and if things go south overall (see #7), I very much doubt tech will be spared.

#9: New forms of journalistic media flourish. I wrote this one because, well, that’s what I’m working on, and so are many other media entrepreneurs. I’ll wait till the end of the year to count them up, but I’m feeling bullish about post-platform media in 2019.

#10: A new “social network” emerges by the end of the year. Tik Tok broke out this year (it launched in 2017), but a Chinese owned meme machine certainly wasn’t what I had in mind. I still think there’s an opening for a new challenger to Facebook, and who knows, it might emerge before the year is up.

So where does that leave me, half a year in? Batting about .500, it seems. I’ll be taking notes as we head toward Dec. 31st. Thanks for reading, and keeping me honest. I hope to be writing a lot more in the coming months.

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Mapping Data Flows: Help Us Ask the Right Questions

I’ve been quiet here on Searchblog these past few months, not because I’ve nothing to say, but because two major projects have consumed my time. The first, a media platform in development, is still operating mostly under the radar. I’ll have plenty to say about that, but at a later date. It’s the second where I could use your help now, a project we’re calling Mapping Data Flows. This is the research effort I’m spearheading with graduate students from Columbia’s School for International Public Affairs (SIPA) and Graduate School of Journalism. This is the project examining what I call our “Shadow Internet Constitution” driven by corporate Terms of Service.

Our project goal is simple: To visualize the Terms of Service and Data/Privacy Policies of the four largest companies in US consumer tech: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. We want this visualization to be interactive and compelling – when you approach it (it’ll be on the web), we hope it will help you really “see” what data, rights, and obligations both you and these companies have reserved. To do that, we’re busy turning unintelligible lines of text (hundreds of thousands of words, in aggregate) into code that can be queried, compared, and visualized. When I first imagined the project, I thought that wouldn’t be too difficult. I was wrong – but we’re making serious progress, and learning a lot along the way.

One of the most interesting of the early insights is how vague these documents truly are. The conditional (“might,” “could,” “may” etc) seems to be their favorite verb tense. It likely comes as no surprise to dedicated readers, but despite the last two years of public outrage, tech companies can pretty much do anything they want with your data, should they care to. Another interesting takeaway: The sheet amount of information that *can* be collected is staggering. A third insight: Even if you can find the data dashboards that give you control over how your data is used, cranking them to their fullest powers often won’t limit data collection and use, but rather will limit their application in very specific use cases. It’s all about the metadata. Lastly, it’s fascinating to see how similar these documents are across the top four companies, and how Apple, for example, has pretty much exactly the same rights to use your data as, say, Facebook.

I could go on, but what we really want to know is what *you* wish you understood about these companies’ data practices. That’s why we’ve built a very short, very subjective survey that we’re hoping you’ll take to give us input and feedback as we start to actually build our visualization.

I’ve buried the lead, but here’s the ask: Will you please take a minute to give us your input? Here’s the link, and thanks!

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Lead, Business Affairs

Do you know this person? Might it be you?

Over the years I’ve found some of the best business partners by posting on this site. The overall audience for Searchblog has waxed and waned, but I’m deeply appreciative that there’s a core group of you who still watch this feed to see whatever it is I happen to be thinking about.

You may have noticed I’ve not been posting as much as I normally do, and there’s a reason for that. Back when I wrote about moving to New York, I promised to keep you updated on what I’m working on now that I’ve settled in. While I continue my work at Columbia and my engagement with NewCo (more on that soon), one my projects has become central, a new company I’m working on with several New York-based journalists and entrepreneurs. We’re keeping the focus of the company under wraps for now, but we’ve started hiring, and I’m looking for a business side partner who can handle any number of key functions as we build the company. I’m posting the role below. As the weeks progress, there’ll be any number of other roles we’ll be looking for, across technology, partnership/sales, and more. So stay tuned for that. But for now, I’m looking for what I’m calling Lead, Business Affairs. If you or someone you know is interested, please reach out. I’m jbat at battellemedia dot com. I look forward to hearing from you.

***

The Business Affairs Lead will be one of the earliest founding team members of a hybrid media/technology company, responsible for crucial business functions throughout early launch. The qualified candidate can competently tackle nearly any business task related to starting a company, and has familiarity with media business models, in particular digital video, subscription, advertising, and social media. The Business Affairs lead will manage the company’s accounting, finance, contract, reporting, development and other key functions. As the company grows, any number of opportunities to either specialize, take one or more P&Ls, or grow into any number of senior functions will emerge. The company has already secured seed financing from a well known NY-based venture firm.

The company is in pre-launch and not promoting itself. The founding partners each have more than three decades of deep experience in media, technology, and venture finance. Qualified candidates will be briefed in detail. This is a full time position starting immediately, in New York, with market compensation and early equity.

Qualifications

At least five to ten years experience.

Ability to manage a budget/accounting.

Demonstrated comfort and experience handling contracts and interference.

Strong communication skills and attention to detail. Confidence, humility, passion.

Industrious, self-motivator with demonstrated ability to take initiative, make firm decisions, manage projects, in a fast-paced environment.

Excellent people skills and ability to develop and maintain productive business partnerships. Startup/media experience a major plus.

Curiosity and willingness to tackle matters outside their area of expertise.

Again, I’m jbat at battellemedia dot com. Thanks for reading!

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With Privacy as Its Shield, Facebook Hopes To Conquer the Entire Internet.

Never mind that man behind the privacy curtain.

I’ll never forget a meal I had with a senior executive at Facebook many years ago, back when I was just starting to question the motives of the burgeoning startup’s ambition. I asked whether the company would ever support publishers across the “rest of the web” – perhaps through an advertising system competitive with Google’s AdSense. The executive’s response was startling and immediate. Everything anyone ever needs to do – including publishing – can and should be done on Facebook. The rest of the Internet was a sideshow. It’s just easier if everything is on one platform, I was told. And Facebook’s goal was to be that platform.

Those words still ring in my ears as we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the web today. And they certainly should inform our perspective as we continue to digest Facebook’s latest self-involved epiphany.

Last week Mark Zuckerberg declared privacy the new black, and committed his multi-hundred-billion dollar company wholeheartedly in favor of it. Employing the now familiar trope that “people I’ve been talking to have been saying privacy’s a thing they care about,” Facebook’s monarch appeared to be pivoting his entire company around this newfound insight, and much of the press seemed to buy it.

But this isn’t a pivot, it’s a panic born of crisis. Facebook’s core business model has plateaued, and absent new channels into which the company might stuff toxic algorithmic advertising, Zuck and crew have had to find a new cash cow. After all, those record-breaking Wall St. earnings won’t keep writing themselves – not with users leaving the service and regulators sharpening their swords for battle.

So Facebook needs to find a new revenue source, one that’s really, really big, and ideally, one that also manages to solve its lousy image as the lusty barker at the surveillance capitalism carnival.

The company has found its answer in the form of WhatsApp, the famously privacy-loving messaging app which Facebook paid $19 billion to acquire five years ago.

So why WhatsApp, and why now?

  • WhatsApp was built on entirely different DNA from Facebook. Its end to end encryption practically screams privacy. Before Zuckerberg’s come to Jesus, Facebook had attempted to turn WhatsApp into another advertising play, which drove WhatsApp’s founders to leave in a very public huff. Since then, WhatsApp has failed to become an advertising channel of any significance. Leveraging WhatsApp’s brand sheen to polish Facebook’s privacy turd is a mad genius move.
  • Going five years without figuring out monetization for a $19 billion acquisition is…embarrassing. Now Facebook can answer Wall Street’s incessant questions about WhatsApp’s contribution to the company’s bottom line.
  • Of all the tech giants, Facebook is most likely to suffer regulators ire here in the United States, including very loud calls for antitrust action. But by pivoting to privacy first and claiming WhatsApp as its new cornerstone, Facebook now has an excuse to integrate Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook, making a breakup technically and socially challenging, if not impossible.
  • Moving the focus of the company from public to private solves — or at least mitigates — Facebook’s intractable First Amendment/public square problems.
  • Most importantly, WhatsApp has the potential to realize Facebook’s long sought dream of *becoming* the Internet for billions of customers around the world.

But how, exactly? To answer that question, Facebook had only look to China’s Tencent, which in two short years has turned its wildly popular WeChat service into a revenue geyser, a new kind of platform where advertising represents just a fraction of the business model.

WeChat has become an ecosystem unto itself, an essential service used by nearly two billion customers to pay for just about everything in China. It features millions of “mini programs,” essentially apps built on top of the WeChat service. Tencent is making billions on top of this new ecosystem, taking a small cut of transactions inside its internal “Tenpay” system, nudging tens of millions of users to level up inside its gaming system, and yes, by offering advertising inside its popular “Moments” feed. Tencent even built a new search engine inside WeChat, a “walled garden” version of search that should prove insanely profitable if done right. Oh, and it gets all the data.

Put simply, WeChat is a universe unto itself, a perfect mix of app store, commerce, social, payments, and search. It’s as if the entire Internet was shrunk into one app. Exactly the kind of world Facebook would like to see happen here in the United States.

Only…WeChat evolved in China, where the concept of individual privacy is utterly foreign, where the state has complete control over the levers of the economy, and where Facebook has been banned for years. It’s a stretch to believe that Facebook could mimic Tencent’s meteoric rise here in the US (not to mention Western Europe and the rest of the world), but if there’s any conclusion to be drawn from Zuckerberg’s latest manifesto, it’s that his company is certainly going to try.

Once Facebook has created an integrated WeChat-like platform reaching billions, it’d be a cinch to lure app developers – perhaps by undercutting Apple and Google’s 20-30 percent take rate, for starters. And anyone in the business of selling anything would also rush to the platform, posing an existential threat to Amazon’s portal-like model of e-commerce dominance. An obvious step would be to build search to unite it all, a necessary move that would dramatically undercut Google’s control of that market as well. The only safe place to be in this scenario seems to be Apple’s hardware business – except that company is itself in the midst of a pivot to services, exactly the kind of services that a Facebook WeChat clone will challenge.

So, to summarize: By declaring “private conversations” as its new business model, Facebook can undermine the app store model driving all of mobile, unseat Amazon as the king of e-commerce, hollow out Google’s control of search, nip Apple’s transition to services in the bud, take a vig on every transaction across its ecosystem, and insinuate itself into the private, commercial, and public lives of every citizen on the Internet. If the company pulls this off – and yes, that’s a big if – we’ll look back on the past ten years, replete with all our fears of the social media’s dominance in our lives, as positively quaint in comparison.

Never mind that man behind that curtain, folks.

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Our Industry Is Failing. Will We Fix It?


If the latest tech revelations have proven anything, it’s that the endless cycle of jaw-dropping headlines and concomitant corporate apologetics has changed exactly nothing.

Over and over, the pattern repeats. A journalist, researcher, or concerned citizen finds some appalling externality associated with one of our largest technology platforms. Representatives from the indicted company wring their hands, take down the offending content and/or de-platform the offending accounts, all the while assuring us “we actively police violations of our terms of service and are always looking to improve our service.”

And then it happens again. And again. And again.

Let’s look at this past week’s YouTube debacle as an exemplar.

Day one, a former YouTuber posts a video and commentary on Reddit laying out how YouTube’s recommendation algorithms have enabled pedophiliacs to thrive on the platform.

Day two, a handful of advertisers declare their shock, pulling ads from the platform.

Day three, YouTube issues a statement: …”we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube….We enforce these policies aggressively, reporting it to the relevant authorities, removing it from our platform and terminating accounts. We continue to invest heavily in technology, teams and partnerships with charities to tackle this issue.” The company also deletes hundreds of accounts and tens of millions of pedophilic comments.

Advertisers shrug, wait for the controversy to die out, then renew their buys. According to industry publication Digiday, most advertisers simply ignored the issue altogether. “YouTube is such a brand-unsafe environment. But it works. They give you the views, they give you the conversions,” is how an advertising agency executive responded to the story.

“It works.”

That simple phrase explains the root problem with all our tech platforms, whether it’s Uber hollowing out our public infrastructure, Facebook hollowing out our civic discourse, Instagram hollowing out our children’s self esteem and civility, Amazon hollowing out our commercial marketplaces, or Airbnb (yes, sorry, same business, better branding) hollowing out our cities’ economic and cultural diversity. These platforms *work* for their intended constituents – whether they be advertisers, consumers, or shareholders (especially shareholders). They are radically efficient artificial business intelligences doing exactly what they’ve been programmed to do. They work.

These are our most celebrated economic successes, paragons of a forty-year march of neoliberal economic theory in lock step with automated, data-driven technologies. They are uniquely American – prizing the convenience, liberty, and agency of the individual (and the shareholder) above all else.

And we are finally realizing they – and by extension we – are destroying our social fabric.

After years of growing dissent, a burgeoning coalition of academics, policymakers, journalists and yes, even a few techno-capitalists have come to realize that it’s time to change our definition of what “working” really means.

It won’t be easy. We Americans prize convenience and winning over pretty much everything else. Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber – these companies are massively convenient winners – at least by the definitions that have framed the American political economy these past four decades. Forcing this change will test our society’s ability to work together toward a common good. But if our industry doesn’t change fundamentally, I’m increasingly convinced it will fail – slowly first, then all at once. More on that in the next post.

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