{"id":5100,"date":"2014-09-14T07:12:45","date_gmt":"2014-09-14T13:12:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5100"},"modified":"2014-09-14T08:10:44","modified_gmt":"2014-09-14T14:10:44","slug":"the-manipulators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=5100","title":{"rendered":"The manipulators"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"marionettes\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In “The Manipulators<\/a>,” a new essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>, I explore two much-discussed documents published earlier this year: \u201cExperimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks\u201d by Adam Kramer et al. and “Judgment in Case C-131\/12: Google Spain SL, Google Inc v Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos, Mario Costeja Gonzalez” by the Court of Justice of the European Union.\u00a0The latter, I argue, helps us make sense of the former. Both challenge us to think afresh about the past and the future of the net.<\/p>\n

Here’s how the piece\u00a0begins:<\/p>\n

Since the launch of Netscape and Yahoo twenty\u00a0years ago, the development of the internet has been a story of new companies and new products, a story shaped largely by the interests of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The plot has been linear; the pace, relentless. In 1995 came Amazon and Craigslist; in 1997, Google and Netflix; in 1999, Napster and Blogger; in 2001, iTunes; in 2003, MySpace; in 2004, Facebook; in 2005, YouTube; in 2006, Twitter; in 2007, the iPhone and the Kindle; in 2008, Airbnb; in 2010, Instagram; in 2011, Snapchat; in 2012, Coursera; in 2013, Google Glass. It has been a carnival ride, and we, the public, have been the giddy passengers.<\/p>\n

This year something changed. The big news about the net came not in the form of buzzy startups or cool gadgets but in the shape of two dry, arcane documents. One was a scientific paper describing an experiment in which researchers attempted to alter the moods of Facebook users by secretly manipulating the messages they saw. The other was a ruling by the European Union\u2019s highest court granting citizens the right to have outdated or inaccurate information about them erased from Google and other search engines. Both documents provoked consternation, anger, and argument. Both raised important, complicated issues without resolving them. Arriving in the wake of revelations about the NSA\u2019s online spying operation, both seemed to herald, in very different ways, a new stage in the net\u2019s history \u2014 one in which the public will be called upon to guide the technology, rather than the other way around. We may look back on 2014 as the year the internet began to grow up.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read on<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Image: “Marionettes<\/a>” by Mario De Carli.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In “The Manipulators,” a new essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I explore two much-discussed documents published earlier this year: \u201cExperimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks\u201d by Adam Kramer et al. and “Judgment in Case C-131\/12: Google Spain SL, Google Inc v Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos, Mario Costeja […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5100"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5103,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5100\/revisions\/5103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}