On May 10, a United States Senate Committee sent a letter to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to respond to accusations that “employees of Facebook routinely suppressed conservative political viewpoints on the social network.”
Former Facebook employees reportedly said that they had manipulated the content of “Trending Topics,” which displays news based on recent popularity, pages that a user has “liked,” and his or her location. The committee asked whether the supposedly “neutral, objective algorithm” used by Trending topics is “in fact subjective and filtered to support or suppress particular political viewpoints.” In fact, one website reported that Facebook employees asked Zuckerberg whether the company ought to help prevent Donald Trump from winning the presidential election.
The Facebook controversy highlights an increasing realization about the power of tech companies not only to collect data about reality, but to influence reality itself. The presence and depth of monitoring technologies, the achievements of data analytics, and the ubiquity of social media are combining to yield emergent new properties - some encouraging and some alarming.
These new properties are the topic of a recent article by Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus Shoshana Zuboff. She calls the phenomenon “surveillance capitalism.” Reading her article, I was struck by the resonance between surveillance capitalism and what engineers call “feedback control.” Specifically, surveillance capitalism is a form of “human-in-the-loop” (HiTL) feedback control. HiTL feedback control is a useful lens through which to understand the revolution in data analytics, and I will employ its terminology in this article.
Feedback control in the US and Soviet Union
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Cold War fostered a fierce race to explore and dominate outer space. Realizing that satellites and rockets would require a degree of automatic navigation, both the US and the USSR fostered rapid advances in a discipline known as “feedback control.”
Former Facebook employees reportedly said that they had manipulated the content of “Trending Topics,” which displays news based on recent popularity, pages that a user has “liked,” and his or her location. The committee asked whether the supposedly “neutral, objective algorithm” used by Trending topics is “in fact subjective and filtered to support or suppress particular political viewpoints.” In fact, one website reported that Facebook employees asked Zuckerberg whether the company ought to help prevent Donald Trump from winning the presidential election.
The Facebook controversy highlights an increasing realization about the power of tech companies not only to collect data about reality, but to influence reality itself. The presence and depth of monitoring technologies, the achievements of data analytics, and the ubiquity of social media are combining to yield emergent new properties - some encouraging and some alarming.
These new properties are the topic of a recent article by Harvard Business School Professor Emeritus Shoshana Zuboff. She calls the phenomenon “surveillance capitalism.” Reading her article, I was struck by the resonance between surveillance capitalism and what engineers call “feedback control.” Specifically, surveillance capitalism is a form of “human-in-the-loop” (HiTL) feedback control. HiTL feedback control is a useful lens through which to understand the revolution in data analytics, and I will employ its terminology in this article.
Feedback control in the US and Soviet Union
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Cold War fostered a fierce race to explore and dominate outer space. Realizing that satellites and rockets would require a degree of automatic navigation, both the US and the USSR fostered rapid advances in a discipline known as “feedback control.”
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