The digital savagery of Facebook
Should we hold digital platforms themselves to account and design-for-good?
“I remembered quite suddenly that all around the outside of the merry go round there have always been old-fashioned paintings of tiger hunts, elephants, and throwing lassoes in South America. You remember me telling you there are tigers everywhere, on bags of flour, on hundreds of tins of jam stacked behind the grocer…But the same thing works as with savages. We don’t paint over faces anymore, but we decorate the community, lions and tigers are in fact all around. They are mostly pretty filthy & not intrinsic but that’s the system…No symbols, a tiger is just a tiger wherever he happens to be.”
The lost Wimmera years of Sidney Nolan, 25th June 2014
Notions of Evil
Classical Evil has its origin in Dante, epitomised by Lucifer, the d(evil), the fallen angel, the opposite of light, who entraps humans and exposes their weakness and enslaves them in perpetuity in tortured darkness underground for their sin.
Oats Studios explored this theme effectively in its short film Firebase, where a humble Vietnamese farmer enraged by the murder of his wife and daughter in the Vietnam war became a vengeful River God, slaying all most cruelly.
Perhaps we might broadly understand evil in its classical context as the negative energy associated with doing ‘bad things’ and the positive energy associated with doing ‘good’ things, and as humanity becomes more ‘scientific’ and loses belief in the supernatural, this classical evil has been connected to notions of modern evil that circulate in the media through politico-historical means.
An understanding of Modern Evil is not invested in the spiritual, it is invested in persecuting specific individuals who have done evil. These individuals are classed as criminals, who are extinguished in some manner, by the rule of law. Fear of God has been supplanted by fear of punishment by the Justice systems.
However politico-historical derived notions of individual evil are incorrect in one critical way. They mostly remove the possibility that an entire official bureaucracy, a whole corporation, a complete officialdom, or even a digital platform itself can in its entirety be evil, be bad, do bad, do harm.
Bureaucracy and institutions, in general, are faceless, which avoids any claim of evilness to the entity. While certain leaders may be removed for being ‘bad’ or corrupt, fall on their sword, the entirety of the organs of the institution survives the removal of the head, and a new head is grafted on and duly appointed. It’s already planned for — called ‘succession planning’ in HR parlance. The corpus, the body, it survives judgement. It is neither good nor evil, it is just there.
If Facebook facilitates teenage depression, bullying and suicide; or weakens democracy, Facebook apologies and says it is regretful, but the entirety of it survives. It is beyond the ordinary judgement of evilness because it is an entity. Its leaders agree to strengthen internal controls and moderation, to not let it happen again, but it happens again. The digital platform is bigger than the humans who own it. They are not really in control.
Can a ‘faceless’ digital platform be evil?
Actor network theory accepts that non-humans can be actors, can have agency. This was mooted long before AI and now we see that in limited yet spectacular cases like with DeepMind’s products they do have agency. ‘They’ can learn. ‘They’ can do. ‘They’ can enact change in the real world, not just cyberspace. ‘They’ drive us around and make pizzas. ‘They’ tell us if we’re going to hit a moose or a traffic cone. They do this physically and, in facebooks case, by interlacing with our human story, can harm us.
Just as Nolan’s tiger above is just a tiger where ever you see it, not a symbol or abstract representation; evil is just evil, where ever and in whatever you encounter it.
Evil is protected in a corporate sense because while there are extensive laws related to corporate governance and accountability, they are targeted at individual officers. Can I actually take a digital platform itself to court as a nonhuman defendant? No.
How often are there cases of computational failure facilitated by a digital agent that causes shame, harm, offence or death?
If a computational platform can perpetrate evil, why is the system not held up as bad? It did harm, the digital platform itself is the bad actor (just as a malware does harm as weaponised code) and the code itself is by extension ‘evil’.
The large part of the problem with Facebook is that it (the platform) has no inbuilt fear of consequences. It just ‘is’. Just as a nuclear warhead just ‘is’. But nuclear warheads are (hopefully!) under strict control, Facebook as a massive organic social platform enmeshing 2.2 billion humans in its ad revenue megalomania is apparently not fully under its owners’ control. [1]
Design-for-good, rebuild Facebook
If you accept that an amorphous global digital platform that is not a human individual, and, because it does evil things, it can be evil, that leads to some interesting necessary actions on the part of its digital shepherds (developers and their AI code).
The imperative of profit means Facebook won’t turn itself off. But they should. A tweak here and there won’t cut it. Reengineer it from the ground up, take the best of what they have done (connecting humans and enriching human lives) and remove the rest (like powering the coup in Myanmar, or facilitating cyber-bullying). But they won’t because of the dominant discourse of growth and efficiency profits from incendiary information and digital experience addiction.
Facebook, (and Instagram, TikTok et al) all have known issues they create in human society. Why can’t they be redesigned and relaunched to be less evil, to do less evil? Why can’t the digital platform itself be held to account instead of it just being viewed as a faceless asset of a conglomerate?
I argued a while ago that AI systems powering the likes Facebook should have existential fear programmed into them if their creators will not. It seems this problem isn’t going away, more evil will be done by nonhuman agents and the human owners will escape judgement.
Savages have the law of the jungle, the survival of the fittest, no laws of accountability, no morality. The likes of Facebook is the savage digital tiger operating with impunity doing evil amongst us.
Footnotes
[1] Other digital experiences (email, search, browsing, eCommerce, AfterPay, online banking, news, forums) have their origin in established human mores and norms and seem less fraught with the issue we discuss here and are more ‘normalised’ in their breadth and reach.
