welcome to our panel politicizing engagement i'm so happy that everyone's here and so grateful to the theorizing the web organisers for letting us put this together i thought before we started talking about politicizing engagement we could maybe just do quick introductions of ourselves my name is moira weigel i'm a writer in an academic on a postdoc right now and i'm also here in my capacity as a founder of logic magazine logic is a new everyone doesn't know logic isn't a new magazine about technology this is our latest issue we come out three times a year and we publish books from time to time on such topics as sex intelligence the most recent issue is scale what else did i want to say about logic we have a website that is in progress called logic nagged io or you can see things and we currently have c fps out for two forthcoming issues so i imagine a lot of folks here are writers  teachers or have colleagues who who like to write about technology politics and culture please pitch us our next our next issue we're commissioning tours on the theme of play and the issue after that will be about china tech in china we're doing a bilingual columnist i write at the intercept and i contributed to the sex issue of logic a huge fan of logic and i teach critical journalism at the new school hi everybody my name is tim wong i'm the managing editor of a publication called the california review of images and mark zuckerberg we are we're an academic scholarly journal the most prestigious journal actually on this topic looking into issues around so your first cfp one of the suggested topics was duct race and class and i've been laughing about it ever since um cool well so when we started talking about the idea for this panel back last fall last winter we were talking you know it was sort of that moment when the tech companies had been called before congress for the first time the sort of tech backlash that we've been inhabiting was getting started and it struck us that this metric engagement that engineers are told to optimize for was sort of coming into question in a certain way that it hadn't been the idea that a platform like facebook is a neutral tool the idea that an engineer always wants to optimize for engagement and engagement is self evidently good because if people are using in a certain way they must want it these sort of libertarian ideas around technology that have often staff used silicon valley culture seem to be coming into question for the first time so i think we wanted to think about how is engagement not neutral like what politics are embedded in this idea of engagement what might other metrics be but anyway i thought it would be fun to start with a lightning round since the three of you have expertise in these like very different domains and think about terms of engagement how we define engagement and what we talk about when we talk about engagement so i thought tim since you have experience in industry and know about how these companies big tech companies work on the inside a bit i wondered if you could talk about how folks within the industry talk about engagement and how engineers a big platforms think about that term sure definitely so one way i like to frame up some of these issues is really kind of building on sort of  notion of sort of james scott's seeing like a state right so the theory here is basically that states in order to administrate basically need to introduce all sorts of systems to allow it to administrate and there's a number of things that you do in terms of quantification standardization that are really required at basically trying to manage large amounts of people large amounts of technology large amounts of capital and one of the things i think that we see in the engagement case is what we might call sort of seeing like a platform right which is how do you take this kind of global sort of billion plus person platform and try to make it better quote unquote right and really in that case you've kind of gone to sort of what is most visible or easy to get to right so you say well maybe one way of indicating whether or not people like it or not is just whether or not they use it at all and so i think we see this sort of very kind of impoverished vision of engagement sort of emerging as kind of engineers and other people who are really kind of trapped in this product process on a quarterly by quarterly basis right say okay so how do we demonstrate we're having success and the easiest way is to look at things like clicks like views but you know i think this is one of the interesting questions right is that they've kind of gone to what's most sort of easy to acquire in terms of data the results have been perhaps not as kind of folsom as a term like engagement might suggest and so i think the question is this kind of mitigation between sort of the complexity of a term like engagement and and  sort of the simplicity of the metrics that are being used within industry to try to capture that or to measure that interesting on the topic of sort of like broadening or enriching how we think about engagement i was curious sibylla how you think about like civic engagement in relation to these tech platforms and infrastructures or democratic ideas about engagement that we have for maybe older tradition that's great and just kind of building off of some laid out so um you know if we so i guess a couple of things i mean one is you know part of the pitch right of the platforms is in part that they are enormous ly powerful and and on theory beneficial tools for civic engagement i think about how much of political activism whether we think of that in a positive way or in a harmful way how much of that happens on twitter or on facebook right and is enabled by those platforms and so there's a way in which the civic engagement piece of engagement is one of those metrics that is sort of presented as a point of success but i think you know kind of to build off of the way there's the downsides right to how we understand engagement as clicks or as engagement with the platform it's not the same thing as engagement with communities as engagement with relationships as engagement with politics and the polity right what you're engaging with is the platform and on the platform's terms and so if you think you know one way to think about it is you know our cat actually so i build a house and i invite you into that house but there's only one door and it only leads to a particular room that is kind of uncomfortable for you to sit in you know but um but you know you've entered that room because you know there's not really anywhere else for you to go right and so you know you've engaged you've you know in that sense like you have indicated your support for my design but it's only because i've architected the design in a particular way and so i think part of what we pretend about broader notions of engagement it's making a distinction between engagement on the terms as designed by someone else versus engagement to actually design the space in the first place and i think that latter form of engagement is what we really think mean or ought to mean when we say democracy and so it just kind of goes to how little of the platform's even though they sort of have this veneer of facilitating democratic engagement  they're thoroughly and do democratic structures right i'm in all sorts of ways yeah that's great that's really helpful given all your experience covering and participating and you know or watching for years now movements like occupy an antiphon other kinds of political work i'm wondering how you think about engagement both in those movements and those activities and then also in how they use platforms and sort of mobile tools online tools how do you think about english i mean part of the issue is a lot platform and that's that's not just a digital thing right if you're able to amass a group who are masked and non identifiable you've created a different political object in the streets that's able to  right and and that sort of produced this idea of what what can go so wrong about twitter activism and the kind of potential for meaninglessness in the creation of these  that certainly shaped plays a role in shaping any sort of movement any sort of revolution but in the same way anything shapes it like any sort of tool that is engaged in and any sort of possible tools determine the shape of a movement and what happens in it i don't think it's anything particularly unusual when it's digital as opposed to meat based aside sometime it's hide from scalability but there's nothing there's no i wouldn't want to draw a value judgement se i think that was a really interesting that's a great segue i was curious like so if we have these different definitions of engagement in the air and we have the sort of industry view of these kinds of metrics that are easy to measure and assess and assemble they sort of two definitions of engagement and civic life or political life and then these kinds of structures of relationality that you're talking about i'm curious if these different ideas about engagement that we have in the air are like in conflict with one another they complementary to one another i mean i feel as if the answers that you've given already have started to touch on this but is like the kind of engagement that a platform like facebook wants to optimize for at odds with somehow trying to organize people towards democratization or like towards movements that might work on building a more democratic in for structure that kind of thing does any want to go first really quick just on that i mean so i think there's a subtext in all three of our comments but just to make it plain right it it matters a great deal sort of what the purpose is behind the engagement optimization are right and so facebook is not a public organization right it's a private firm whose objective is to maximize  not necessarily profits but to maximize return for its owners its shareholders and that means a certain use of the tools in a certain way of measuring engagement and then also it means sort of  either it sort of affects the way what we can their degrees of freedom that we can expect the platform to sort of pursue right and so that's just a structural problem that you know our versions of engagement might imply a platform structure and require sort of to carry on that and to answer your question about the kind of potential conflicts therein i think about it sort of just popped into my head i think about the way verrilli o talked about highways and moving through cities and things that we use a need to be denizens right and for like um a policy to sort of make sense but very leo's point was also every technology every sort of space that every century every technology risk it carries miscommunication as well as it carries communication and that you know as true as you know the building of titanic included the fact that titanic could sink right so i think that's just a kind of point about technology that's predate the measurement of engagement is sort of itself the harm right that is to say like the act of measuring engagement is is you know ultimately kind of cheapening the whole notion of engagement right so to put that in concrete terms right  the fact that an activist group using like this is the fact that they use google analytics like is that the harm itself that you visualize a movement in those terms or is it does it come down to actually the the possessor of the kind of quantification that is part of the problem and the answer is it could very well be sort of both but i think it's important to keep those two types of harm separate because i think they present actually quite different conceptual issues i'm like as a platform capitalists know if someone engages in a platform capitalist doesn't measure it does anyone he i would love to hear you too because i know there's something you thought about talk are there like different ways of thinking about this within companies are sort of like within organizations that you feel irrelevant to think about here like how different engineers within a single company like google sure thinking about engage yeah so one of the things i did before i took on this post at the journal was that i was helping to do public policy around ai and machine learning for it for google and i think one of the things that sort of comes out of that experience is the idea that we often have this kind of notion of facebook as basically sort of like this monolithic entity which is basically now saying you know we want to totalize all of human engagement through metrics and what's interesting is that kind of misses the the kind of interesting dynamics that occur within the company that is to say that you know there often does not tend to be like a single entity saying these are the metrics you will apply instead there are many kind of separate entities within the company fighting each other for influence and control within that corporate entity and sort of metrics are kind of marshaled as a way of gaining advantage over one group or another and what what's interesting with that i think is basically that rather than sort of these metrics really driven by these kind of external logics that there are actually these internal logics that justify external data collection and in many cases everybody knows that the numbers are trash right and i think it's one of the interesting things about measuring engagement is that most people know like clicks me nothing views me nothing and like a lot of that traffic is bots right and so there is this kind of really interesting game that sort of played internally as to like what leaders within a company think is credible and how do you get the numbers to like justify the action that you want to take and so there's almost this kind of internal theater that plays out in our discussion about what are the metrics that we  as a matter of sort of the public sphere do you see sorry not to put you on the spot but in something that's been important to logic and that we've been following very closely as a sort of tech worker activism and engagement over the past year or so since the trump election groups like tech workers coalition tech solidarity new york tsa tech action committee have been of great interest to us i mean have you ever encountered can you imagine scenarios in which those kinds of debates over what metrics mean internally also produce like activist potential or political potential among engineers or people in an organization i think so i mean if anything it's it's sort of like the internal absence of metrics knowledge which is actually like been like a spark for political action within the company so you think here about basically like a google suppression of like wage differentials among genders right and so like for instance right right and and i think that case is a really interesting one in that you know for such a metrics driven company like why would you deny access to these metrics right and so i think there is actually this question about sort of who seen and who has access to c which is actually kind of like a much more complicated part of the story rather than like isn't the problem that everybody just thinks about likes all the time so that's been really galvanizing i know for like lots of various kinds of folks around the industry an activists and backtracking a little bit but i was keen to hear sopl respond to the idea about highway isn't verrilli oh because i know you think about old antitrust structures and other older kinds of networks and how they might help us think about today no that was great thoughts on both of these concert so provocative but mean first a sentence or two about when tim just said you know i think this idea of metrics as a language of power right both internal to the firm and then in our larger conversation right the thing we measure then becomes the language that we use to make claims one way or another right and then the thing we can't measure becomes the thing that we then become silenced right the thing that we can't talk about  so so there there's an interaction between the between these sort of things of metrics language and then the kinds of arguments that you can make and then therefore the kinds of politics that you can imagine either internal to the firm or or externally more generally there's this phrase you know every card carrying political scientist of which i'm one has this is because this phrase beaten into their head and graduate school which is about politics congress is of a knot in it right congress does not ever act of one will is five hundred and thirty five people and and it's a product of all these internal factions that produces outcomes but as you're talking them as very much thinking about that your facebook is of a knot in it and and that's something that we often sort of forget but now back talking a little bit to the to the infrastructure point that tash raised so i love that analogy i'm going to look up this piece you may you mentioned but um so i mean yeah i think you know my into my own work the main way i've been sort of trying to theorize the platform's is as infrastructure right and so it's very much analogous to standard we design the failures that that infrastructure conduces to but i think the fact that it is infrastructure sort of heightens the stakes of a lot of these types of concerns and so even you know so i do a lot of legal history on some of the stuff in what's fascinating you go back and you look at you know that moment in time where the new technology was gasworks and water water piping systems and the language that people are using to wrestle with that problem is very much the language that we're using now in the tech context right they're worried about this is stuff that we all depend on this is but this is in private hands and we're not so sure how do we hold that private control of infrastructure accountable to the public purposes that we want to direct its stuff to and and you see all these old court cases about like water shutoffs and gas you know it's like it's fascinating and is but it's exactly in the same terms that we're now talking about facebook right and and the whole legal regimes we build to sort of try to make our way to something less dangerous and yeah and i think not quick note about thinking about sort of facebook or any of these platforms as infrastructures is that i think an interesting element of the politics of it is that they are often infrastructures that don't want themselves to be considered as infrastructures so i had a debate with someone who does sort of content policy for facebook so this is the team that basically is in some ways sort of the internal legislature for a company like facebook that says here is what we consider to be of hate speech abcd here's what we consider to be obscene  and we sort of came up to this question of you know so how do you define terrorism and they're like oh oh on and so forth and i said well you know that there's a number of like these international conventions like people have tackled the question of what is terrorism and they say well well no no no we wouldn't want to be involved in the politics around terrorism and so i then and so then i said then i asked him so what is the definition that use and and there is this kind of asean moment where the person articulated a definition of terrorism which was very much on all fours with the international definition of terrorism and when asked about he said oh well no no you see this came through a product process this came through a consumer like trust and safety process right and so there's this interesting thing where it kind of takes on the flavor of legislation even though is sort of none of its im or impact is considered that you would consider in sort of like a legislative context and so the very frame of the language i think is playing a really huge role in this question of like what happens if you are in infrastructure but you don't think your one or perhaps even worse what do you think you're in if you're an infrastructure but you actually aren't you aren't one right is also a really interesting question so so i think those types of kind of breakdowns i think makes some of these pictures more complicated as a service um i'm gonna go to jail on the internet that is a great segue it's funny i wanted us to talk about i feel like in recent weeks and months if folks are the center for humane technology seen tristan beatty um i think i was interested when we're talking about engagement i feel like another word that's in the air and w certainly in the air and we were coming up with this panel is exploitation and what's the relationship between engagement and exploitation i imagine a lot of us have and they're sort of a colloquial meaning to this i'd love to talk about a more theoretical sort of like marx in one but i think that  round the center for humane technology these new sort of apologia is that we're getting from x tech executives saying oh it's too addictive my kid is watching these weird cartoons it's upsetting my brain hurts etc that we have this new critical discourse coming from within the industry but very focused on sort of like health and addiction metaphors as opposed to political economic questions or justice questions anyway i was curious i mean terms what we've been talking about and gate as engagement like how does engagement relate to exploitation exploitation of user activity user data may be first colloquially like i don't know what how do you feel about this like addictiveness discourse does it matter whether the facebook notification is red or white to these larger questions that we've  discussing so maybe one initial cut at that so i think the use of public health language is also connected to this really interesting set of literature around like how it is that doctors came to  right and so i think about like oh and the birth of the clinic and sort of these notions that sort of public health language ends up being this very powerful way of kind of appropriating sort of power from so the society as a whole to a smaller kind of class within society and so it is interesting to me that there is a rhetoric of x tech executives saying the problem is a public health problem right because it sort of suggests that we're sort of not willing to give up sort of the elite decision making quality of engagement right the notion that like a group of expert scientists should be the ones that kind of get together in a room and say this is what proper engagement should look like on the platform is itself kind of reifying the problem they just don't agree that like they're not the top of facebook they would like to be right and that's maybe one cynical view of a view of it and and i think part of the concern about kind of like exploitative i used to joke that it's like when thinking about whether in an action is famous useful for feminist politics let's consider am i making money for peter thiel like this is a useful litmus test is it like is that thing i that meem i just posted which may be attracting a bunch of people to my socialist feminist group isn't making money for peter thiel and it's an interesting thing to keep in mind and i don't think it's an easy question about whether engagement is necessarily exploitative because of the structures of capital that's it's embedded in but i'm curious can we think about engagement on big platforms without exploitation to deflect from more structural economic questions and yet to agree with tim it what it very much does is it leaves as an impossibility that the structure the infrastructure you're talking about would go away so it  it's never questioned whether society carries ills people are ill within society so when you start talking about the potential for exploitation because of misuse because of something going wrong or like a glitch in the system or it so i think that you know and we've kind of what you're saying about it being rarefied through a discourse of that and i think that's how a lot of power structures we live in now did function and how illness discourse definitely functions outside of th language right we need codes of conduct for for the content moderators or for the platform's themselves and and and these are all sort of species of the same thing right which is sort of a language of responsibility where the idea is that the infrastructure is assumed to exist and remain the political economy of the infrastructure is assumed to exist and remain and the ideas well we're just going to be more responsible stewards of this infrastructure that is going to exist and remain as is right now that's one way you can go right fair enough i if we think that we trust all of that and you know okay but i think it's quite different from thinking about the actual structure itself and then being willing to ask the question you know should the structure exist should it exist in a radically different form should it exist in radically different sort of political economic form right so whether it's you know kind of that the data is all public or the platform is a cooperative or you know or the platform adds public utility right what would that mean to view these information platforms as public utilities there are all sorts of problems with that but you know we can talk more about that but but i mean all of that is sort of trying to get at that deeper structural level that we've all i think been talking about in the language of health and responsibility our professional judgment whatever it is sort of very much it's not inconsistent with the structural lens but it's um it's orienting us away from those structural questions and i love to hear you go deeper on life whether are they're promising examples of the kinds of platform cooperativ you know public municipal broadband initiatives or i'm not sure what you have in mind but that you could elaborate on briefly yeah just very quickly i mean i think there are sort of a few different variations of this might take and we might like some of them better than others one is sort of kind of privately regulated a privately owned but tightly regulated public utility where essentially you know think of like the business model becomes very boring you'll make a very low but perfectly good rate of return you don't get to do all sorts of crazy fancy stuff the ownership structure is very simplified and they're very tight restraints on what kinds of things you can and can't do right that's that's one model another model is you actually sort of publicize the thing it becomes nationally owned or publicly owned in some cooperative or kind of nationalized form and then a third version sort of a hybrid right is that the private version stays but there's but it's in competition with some public option right so this would be like the municipal broadband case there's still private broadband in theory but it's now there's now a public provided plain vanilla you know cheap but you know not without cross purposes you know version now some of these might work better in the information context than others and and and there are limitations to each of them but i think you know if we're taking the public utilities sort of model that sort of points you in those directions and yeah and quite often whenever these are you know this spread of options or even the kind of underlying idea of it quite often you'll hear a responsive like but then the state owns everything and that's data in then they own and i mean that's true already and the fact of a private companies doesn't doesn't really put many limits on that and we also have different example independent bodies it is not an arm of you know it has its certain centrism that makes it an arm of neoliberal standard but it's not an arm of the british government in the same way that russia today is a propaganda extension of the  kremlin and so you know we do we can be more nuanced in terms of thinking about possibilities here than just being like no but i don't want the state to annex it's the state and surveillance because i mean we do have examples of yeah things that what we want to protect from you know terrifying and hidden statecraft but we can quickly i think it's a really important point and the distinction to my mind is not public versus private it's  concentrated control versus democratic control right you can imagine concentrated forms of private control and concentrated forms of public control neither of which is particularly democratic or you can imagine forms of democratic private control and democratic public control so it's it's goes back to this question about power right who has the power and who has the ability to contest and control the the governance of the infrastructure that's independent of the public private distinction and i feel like in america we're so used to thinking about privacy like merely in terms of government and really in terms of like negative negative liberties and it's like thinking about privacy as an active social right is this whole other thing tim i wanted to ask you again given your background in industry and also you're thinking  mean you're thinking about ai and its ethics and its politics how do we think about exploitation you know in an age of machine learning and an age when the sort of you know algorithms are being trained on databases where we certainly don't know how what facebook might be using our engagement to do facebook also might not know what they're using our engagement to do like what special problems and questions does that pose sure so maybe one way of framing up where the world that we are in right now right is that we kind of take a look at like the way that we're like that's like overly simplistic and comes with very defined harms like you know views right use and you know and and so one approach is like okay well then the platforms need a richer version of engagement right and you know one of the things you can read you know basically the platform's investment in things like ai right is this notion that like a recognition that these metrics are sort of not very good and and this desire for them to be better right sort of the use of machine learning as a way of kind of collecting up a lot more subtle patterns in people's behavior to arrive at a notion of engagement which is considered like a richer and more robust now that points to this really interesting question right which is it seems like we either live in one world where you know the the the measurement of engagement is very thin and comes with a number of harmful effects but one form of improvement is to allow the platforms to collect more data right and and so i think we are kind of trapped in this sort of interesting full fuller way right you know come again with a lot of the same problems and so i think that is part of the tension it's certainly one of the things that's kind of driving like the use of machine learning in the space but i think it's just conceptually this question about like inso another way to think of them as a kind of coal mining infrastructure right like but we're the coal you know so they're their purpose is to extract and mine as like just as much stuff vacuum up as much stuff as i can  brains and our interaction to do what with they don't they may not even know right but they know that that is the commodity right that is that is the resource and so the data is the commodity but more precisely it's our attention and our  engagement on the platform that is the thing that is most valuable right and so that just changed that's another one of these sort of background factors that just changes the valence of all of these things we could imagine less sort of harmful ways but it's it's hard when that structure and yeah and i do think it's it's always an interesting like i hear so many half finished sentences when these questions with like within tech discussions come up within the industry of you know which i mean i'm fine with like i'll spend hours like clicking on pictures of like the olsen twins but like thank you so do you and and i do think there's like so when when people talk about companies i know it's been really interesting with some of the tech worker organizing groups that logic has followed that a lot of them have looked to digital media companies and like media unions for models or for inspiration in terms of worker organization i'm just curious in terms of these ways of thinking about engagement you have any thoughts on how they're playing out in the media ecosystem in terms of how you've seen them in your own work or others in a number of ways right so there is something called chart b which is like the most boring measure of engagement it's just clicks and it also has an option of how long people spend on each story but certainly that's how most newsrooms organize what they prioritize and how they prioritize except for the rare  so you know that's certainly all get over determined so much about how the news industry he's becoming and developed you know and it and i think it speaks to how little these for but then they end up standing for everything because we don't have anything else so ad companies rely on you know choppy click numbers because they have nothing else to rely on then they rely on it so it becomes a feedback loop so the or the contract and there has to be cause if you're going to be fired i've never signed a contract that doesn't have at will firing and that's palling and it really pushes this perk of the precarity and a lot of the at will is because you know an entire little like it's just like basic a minimum amount of security and you know like not the most like appalling vagaries of like pace pay floors let alone pa maybe one way at mauri question on exploitation i think it's actually ends up being very connected to this question of whether or not scale is ever okay what i mean by that is under what circumstances right does command of attention become exploitative or become coercive and one would say okay well you know facebook is coercive exploitive because it has the ability to say like we want to direct all the attention towards this or that or whatever but i think it's worth taking a step back in time and thinking about the rhetoric around the web in the late s and early s where the dream was we have this longtail thing that's gonna be great right like the internet's gonna knock down the walls publishing and now there's lots of lots of small groups that will be able to kind of command attention one of the ironies is even in a pre facebook era we saw actually a huge amount of concentration where you sort of knocked down all these editorial bars and then you sort of ended up with five blogs that controlled most of the transmission of attention through the web and there it seems to be maybe arguably a case where you say okay in the kind of pre network platform era you know we still had a number of blogs that really command a lot of attention is ultimately our beef just with the notion that one or a small group of people can command attention and that is actually ultimately what we find coercive right maybe that's one cut out the problem is is is what we're talking about just to worry about scale or is there actually something unique about control to attention that makes certain uses less okay than others totally and i mean i feel like the nature of network networks and network effects are such of course i'm thinking of david grewal's book on this network power but it's like that that sliding scale and a different sense between consent and coercion like at what point can one opt out if everyone in the world is on a platform like that i don't know i think that raises really interesting questions about what consent even is what point one can seek to give it and then the thing you've just raised it's like is the other end of the long tail of the power curve i guess right and it kind of reduces itself to a kind of absurdity right because if you say okay yeah there is some kind of scale that we think is just just course if we don't want that society then we get into the absurdity of like okay do you cross that twenty million users or thirty million users so like what is that number right and and i think that that that gray area i think is really interesting to investigate right which is like what is the threshold of attention coercion and like at that point we want like the alarm bells to go off but i don't know if there is a justified way of doing it again probably a notion of again kind of arguing for considering these as political questions certain public health questions not just letting tristan harris ring the bell  sometimes think the thing of the social factories everywhere like exploitation happens everywhere and that's part of what's interesting about that theoretical tradition and pivot that it makes possible is engagement everywhere like every never are we ever not engaged yeah one thing i've been puzzling over  before this panel was kind of is right so basically like what i mean and to complete the thought i guess is sort of but there's lots of forms of attention that don't really kind of rise to the level of what we would consider engagement so for example like you know letting a movie how to play past you right like you your focal points if your eyes are pointed at the screen but there's sort of no no underlying engagement and so you know maybe one way of thinking about it is the ways into which attention is sort of a necessary though not sufficient condition  i think it's i think it raises like a really interesting question but again i'm getting this feeling of unfinished sentences of you know so if you can ask are we ever not engaged it becomes sort of it becomes philosophical  but with that like any infrastructure risk but and there is this sort of tikkun tradition like swanky philosophy boy like fogg like what if we became solved like brak thing maybe to throw something on the table i mean maybe one way of articulating a goal here right is maybe to think about whether or not society has the permission or the possibility of like engaging in many different kinds of ways or for engagement to be multiv nature so one of the things i think that feels very disheartening alien about the nature of these platforms is not so much that the command engagement but that they attempt to securitize engagement right that there's an attempt to kind of take what we know if as attention and then turn it into sort of these tranches that then can be sold out right and and that that sort of uniformity of engagement so the notion that we can engage in sort of a single or limited set of ways ends up being part of the problem  and and i think it's also simultaneously why you know some people say oh well the right way to resist is to have these you know these kind of situationist experiences on these platforms it feels liberating because it provides a new form of engagement of course the critique there first is that doesn't like deal with the underlying kind of you know capital questions around it but but i think kind of explains why it does feel so liberating and i think it speaks to that that concern about sort of  you think of in if we think of engagement in sort of its thick moral sense right engagement like human engagement with other people with communities with the polity right not engagement in the platform sense all engagement requires some kind of infrastructure to facilitate it right to make it possible to allow it to thrive and we build those infrastructures all the time right we build communities we build civic spaces we build physical infrastructures we build  relationship networks that are a kind of social infrastructure right and so part of what i think we're struggling with here is that when the infrastructure of engagement is a platform eyes one that is securitized in all of these ways not only is there a problem about that but there's a way in there's a there's a worry or a problem about how it's displacing or vacuuming up resources that could otherwise that could otherwise go into these other types of infrastructures so  that's kind of very thirty thousand foot way of seeing it but to make it concrete right if we're worried about the public sphere and public engagement in in politics yes part of the problem is fake news and platforms and manipulation and on face twitter but that's exacerbated by the collapse of of journalism and local news and and sort of this this older model where the journalists covering an issue was a literal representative of your community because they wrote for your local paper and therefore channelled your concerns in the very questions they asked and the things that they wrote about and so and and the collapse of that infrastructure is directly related to the rise of this other infrastructure so it's really a two for one right we're worried about the platform infrastructure itself but then there's a shadow worry that the platform infrastructure is making impossible displacing or supplanting other infrastructures of human social political communal experience and then how do we redirect those flows right of resources and whether it's our attention or financial economic political resources as  of the problem of like the subprime crisis was a system that flat indifference and pretended it didn't exist because you could you know you could put a triple a you could get a triple a tranche because you're flattening the difference between what the like disengage or engage sort of for political productive purposes say or like resistance or enjoyment that isn't sort of more painful so i think yeah like i mean like and i also think it ties back to the birth of network technologies and the current california ideology and of course it was sort of wealthy white man who couldn't f their like vermilion risk in the thing they were producing because you know don't be evil if you've got anything to hide like you know if you haven't got anything to hide like share it like that sort of google transparency was so much no i always think of that too in terms of the metaphors of public space that get thrown around by folks like jack dorsey where it's like the street twitter's a street and it's like a street is more or less good depending what kind of body you have and how you might experience other people like heckling you on the street or police killing you on the street or you know it's i always thought about the ways in which those metaphors if the public sphere gets celebrated and embraced uncritically really bespeak like the social homogeneity of silicon valley quickly just done that just because this always annoys me that the language of the platform's appropriate the language of publicness but if you read their legal filings as they're defending themselves against the  they actually it's required for them to resist the notion of twitter as public square because if they were to acknowledge that that changes their legal position and so as a legal matter they their ability to do what they do requires them to not be the public square and in fact to merely be the kind of passive transmission they're the yellow pages and that's it and that's and and if but if they're not the yellow pages and they're actually the public square or if they're neither of those things and they're actually you know the modern version of the new york times all those are all radically different as a matter of constitutional and public law and their legal liability is very different under those three models and so there's a way in which there arbitrage in these different positions right they can talk the language of being the public square in one in one moment and then turn around in the next and say oh where there's nothing public about us at all right we are just your run of the mill friendly neighborhood tech company yeah that's my uber is a transportation network company after all yeah i just want to rip a little bit on this financial metaphor a little bit more cuz i wonder whether or not it also tells us a little bit about what the what the future might look like what i mean by that is  advertisers think they are buying when they buy ads on facebook and what they think they're buying is this concept of engagements right you're buying you know the connections between people right but but that actually doesn't end up being the case right you're buying sort of the cli and likes of things that we've complained about already and so insofar as the numbers are trash right i think it's sort of interesting thinking about whether or not this two thousand and eight metaphor actually goes yet again right that actually what we are about to see is kind of a subprime attention crisis essentially right and that in fact a lot of ad people are buying inventory which doesn't actually correspond to what was promised right and and that stuff gets marked up right as facebook goes right there there are basically the triple a tranches of attention that contain nothing but bots clicking on ads right and so there's almost the scam that both happens at the level of the consumer but also a scam kind of that happens at the level of the admire and like both sides seem like they might cave in right so just told logic that privately we could have shorted engagement and made  the panel thinking about engagement as a metric and i was you know it's something again that like engineers optimize for we should be maximizing engagement i feel like we've talked about the possibilities of disengagement of democratizing engagement but i'm curious if any of you have thoughts about what would an alternative metric look like if there's something other than engagement that these digital infrastructures could be built to facilitate another kind of ideal that we could hold in mind easy question  yeah so one of the things i think about is that you know in engagement we often think about aggregates i wonder whether or not we should actually be thinking about engagements in terms of distribution right so that we think about like a hundred likes a thousand likes but maybe we should think about like who those likes actually sort of represent and whether or not there is kind of a mode or a political argument to be made for a kind of redistributed attention we're sort of rather than trying to maximize across one value you're trying to say do we want to maximize this value across multiple groups and you can actually imagine facebook saying look if this particular group drives too much engagement we actually see that as kind of a negative right and so there's kind of this question of like sort of equality of engagement right or a distribution of engagement that that might lend itself to sort of better potentially better results to make that a little bit more concrete i'm thinking about the exact problem where for example twitter largely responds to white supremacists right but not anyone else who's been having problems on the platform part of that reason is because  they are weighing certain types of large amounts of highly engaged users more than a bunch of other users on the platform and there's a number of design reasons for why that is occurring but you think a little bit about whether or not they should shift from this notion of like well we just have a lot of retweets so it all worked out well too you know who do those retweets represents right i mean the problem is that it would push these platforms in a much more outwardly political this direction which depending on your point of view is either than recognizing what they always were or actually quite a development m works in favor of already powerful you know but not necessarily majoritarian constituencies right and so and and and what do we do about that i mean i think part of it is maybe  a one angle is sort of a different measure of engagement i wonder if the other angle though is sort of going back to theme on the panel as decoupling engagement from exploitation sort of to your framing more right is that if you could imagine a different political economic structure where engagement isn't securitized it isn't harvested it isn't the thing that makes the business model run then how does that change the way the engagement is likely to be governed if you remove  those incentives and those imperatives right and and and so that's maybe a sort of orthogonal but but complimentary sort of angle right is that unalienated engagement right unexploited i quite pessimistic about the kind of possibilities of reform in any of these spaces and the possibility of thinking outside of them given how much they you know in form of like forms of life and habits and practices so i think when you're talking about these massive companies i think we do have to approach them if we are approaching it from an anti capitalist point of view and seeing that that's the only possible really harming yourself and so but you know i think it has to be i don't think we're gonna be able to think up an answer outside of these things i think us as users and the intimate communities we have have to find ways to resist when youtube when you find yourself like sifting through nazi content and like an easy way that they and you know this is very limited in what are the how much is it really gonna work i don't know but we don't have an answer so i think we have to think somewhat small scale on what you can do to make it not worth these companies wiles to keep behaving and some of the more problematic and exploitative ways and i think you know as a small group of people compared to billions of users it's very hard to have that kind of impact but then i suppose you can start wondering about  second order things so if you could really push hard for the new york times to take a stand against twitter or you know which also seems very difficult threatened to not use facebook you know a lot of design and a lot of innovation in these spaces not even taking into account the public's that that even exists and that are building so i'm sure they were surprised but like we shouldn't be think yeah i mean i think it's it's to this question of like unpredictability and you know i think one of the things i observed working inside the companies is the tendency to sort of play the the tails i win heads you lose sort of game what i mean by that is when the to be like well it's a few bad eggs on the platform users you know right tell what they were gonna do and i think there is kind of a tendency and in the comms around some of this which is kind of its lair outside of just kind of like kind of the pearl economic of it which is the platform's kind of being able to play certain roles at certain times and emphasize their relative influence or lack of influence over over the situation though i think really my sense of a lot of the numbers and is that it's an attempt to kind of like control something which is actually always kind of um i have this question for anybody who wants to answer it and so long as we are stuck in this engagement hellhole that apparently we are unable to escape from for the time being do you think that there is the possibility of and then if it is possible and a utility to the idea of unhelpful engagement that generates useless data sort of like culture jamming engagement on social media and like what would that look like and should we bother doing it i developing online tools and developing you know d printers of like absurd like playing with the absurd and i think so i think it's interesting i think it can be playful what would it look like on a mass scale how would you get there is the same problem of how would we any sort of resistance in these spaces so i like the idea of it it also speaks a little bit to like who has the privilege to use the platforms that way given that like actually a lot of use is how we have to organize our lives unfortunately um and also i just think it you know some people doing it on a small scale i don't see how it could really make any impact but it doesn't mean don't try i think i like the idea of so in the same way that we've been sort of diagnosing different forms of structural drivers of the problems that we're talking about i think if we're as we're talking about sort of responses we similarly have to think about what's that same spectrum between sort of of structural on the one end to sort of i'm not sure what the word is but sort of maybe more a kind of short term response or resistance on the other right and there's and i think this this may be you know where we put it on the spectrum we can debate but i think to attach your point right some forms of resistance we can imagine sort of being chained kind of being provocative in certain ways and and that's useful  at some point we need to figure out what's our structural imagination of resistance and this given the structural nature of the problem and just one short point on that too it's like we should remember as well like how how adaptable capitalism is how adaptable capital resistance within the forum and a form that largely is just about addition aggregation the more adding the more in a way that sort of diffuse and weird and a bit useful like they're still used to that like what you know you can hate wat apprentice or love watch it the ratings like this even possible and given that is the idea that tech companies are attempting to do so and kind of making this claim that it's possible does it say something about the culture of the tech industry that they feel that they just just very quickly i mean i'm sure that that's on that but um i mean i think this goes back to the person tim said earlier right which is um that's something we have to ask whether we whether the problem is is the problem how we're measuring or is a problem the fact that we're measuring in the first place right and so if you take away the measurement are the ability to measure then that changes stuff in a pretty dramatic way and and to sort of connect it to some of the other themes you were talking about about resistance and infrastructure i mean  you know if you look back at these historical moments of debates around other types of technological infrastructure that i mentioned one of the interesting things is that part of the debate is can we do we trust anyone with the with the power that this new technology or infrastructure affords and if not if we don't trust our ability to build a system to hold it accountable to what we the public think it ought to be then maybe we shouldn't have it in the first place now that's a hard bullet to bite right there's a cost there but that's the nature of these things right and so i think in the same way that the platform's can't pretend that we can have our cake and eat it too we also can't pretend that we can sort of have our cake you need it to in the other direction right at some point if we think this stuff is a problem we're going to have to make changes in ways that are structural that means certain things that we like as well probably go away and that's just a hard choice we have to make  and if you didn't want to watch it you could signal that you had seen it by standing up and saying the name of the brand so you'd stand up but you go you go mcdonald's and and i'm i think those moments exist and there's lots of incentives to kind of create those types of because you need to be able to like measure in order to show success so that there are lots of mechanisms that are continuously created to to encourage you to sort of signal your engagement and so so i think the tendency will be if it isn't it will sort of be made legible in order to kind of justify the system know at first thank you guys so much i really got a lot from this discussion um i i'm really like you guys did such a good job of i think sort of breaking down a lot of binaries like the you know the whole thing between public versus private and you know just like making things a little bit more complicated than they are and something that you guys sort of brought to the forefront of my mind what is this idea of like individual engagement as a catalyst for change like forcing these platforms to change basically or like to post exactly but or to post you know on people's walls instead of you know like in you know install ad blockers all this stuff then on the other hand you have people calling for regulation but that's also really scary because you have people like senator cornyn who's like calling the internet like a series of tubes still so i my question for anybody on the panel is you know how do you guys think about the relationship between individual action and engagement the topic of this panel i guess and in the relationship to more structural changes that we should be thinking about when grassroots efforts like individual engagement fail thank you so much for your questions and for bringing that all into the space i hope we can hang out for a minute afterwards and talk to anyone who wants to hang around but i do you think we need to get out of the room now you know we started logic because we wanted to bring together different kinds of people in the same space and this kind of event is like a total realization of what we most hope for with it so thank you so much all for being here thank you to our wonderful contributors and to theorising the web