In a radical privacy policy shift, Google announced today that it will begin tracking users across all services—email, Search, YouTube and more—sharing information with no option to opt out. The change was announced in a blog post today, and will go into effect March 1.

Now, as Forbes points out, this is bollocks. This is not a policy shift at all, still less a radical one – tracking users across services has been in Google’s privacy policy since 2005. What I’m trying to figure out, though, is why people are freaking out over this. A couple of possibilities occur to me:

1. People misunderstood the description of the change, and took “sharing information” to mean that Google would be, IDK, going through your email to find your mum’s address so that they could email her links to all the videos you watched on YouTube, or something.
2. People didn’t know that Google was already combining information across products. This is plausible, but why would people care? If you’re worried about Google having your information, why does it matter if they have it in two separate databases or in one?
3. People didn’t know that Google stores information about how you use its services.

Looking at the responses of people on Tumblr, the third seems like it might be the case, but this is very odd. Young Tumblr users are the sort of people who tend to get called “digital natives,” but they seem to lack a basic understanding of how the internet works: Google runs the computers that store your email, so of course they have access to your email; when you search for something you send the search terms to Google’s computers, so again, of course they have access to what you search for . The basic thing which people should understand is that unless you take specific steps to make it otherwise everything you do on the internet is public. It’s public in much the same way as walking down a busy street in a foreign city is public: no-one who has access to the information is likely to care about you, and no-one you care about is likely to have access to the information; but there will always be other people who do have access to this information.

But it’s hard to be sure what’s going on here, because, although I’ve trawled through many of the Tumblr posts on this issue, no-one seems to be explaining exactly what it is that they’re worried about. What, in other words, is the “privacy” that people are worried about here? There are real concerns about privacy, of course, and two of Google’s recent policies – Buzz making people’s email contacts public, and Google+ requiring people use their legal names – potentially expose people to real danger. But this is a concern with services releasing data in ways which are problematic. A lot of concerns about “privacy” seem to be objections simply to the fact of Google tracking data, to the idea that our behavior can be quantified and mathematized. The concern, that is to say, is about privacy in the sense of our true, innermost, self, our bourgeois subjectivity. Or, to put it another way, people are worried about technology stealing their souls.

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3. Pants and rights Flying back from England after Christmas, I got to enjoy the fruits of the US state’s insane institutional paranoia, as the airport staff opened everyone’s bag and patted everyone down before letting us on the plane (flying from the US, I of course had no such problem, as the TSA...

The supposed strategic advice is based on the idea that, if we act in certain ways, the media and police will react in particular ways. But the media has a bunch of structures around which they build stories, and they will slot the actual events into these structures as they see fit; so, whatever the the most militant or photogenic action of the day happens to be gets wedged into the “outrage” slot, if the script calls for an outrage, and whether that particular outrage is property damage or something else is basically irrelevant. As reclaimuc put it on Twitter, “the media will always be terrible, no matter what we do.” This is even more true of the idea that property damage “provokes” the police, which really badly misunderstands the way in which public order policing works. Police responses are not, in general, decided by individual police witnessing specific events, but by senior police and political leaders deciding how to deal with the protest as a whole. If the police attack protestors, it’s because they’ve decided to attack protestors, not because of anything the protestors did (this is also why worrying about police infiltrators is usually pointless; police may use provocateurs to stage-manage their intervention, but the form of their intervention is decided in advance and is independent of what either protestors or provocateurs do).

In both cases, the liberal position is based around a belief that we can control how we are perceived, and how the state (and its ideological apparatuses like the media) will respond to us. Or actually this could be put more strongly: the criticism reveals the liberal’s desperate need to be in control. The fact that protestors have very limited ability to prevent state crackdowns, and certainly individual protestors can do almost nothing, is scary, and it conflicts with deeply held liberal beliefs about how the state works, and how protesting can change it.

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1. Acts and images of protest The coverage was almost entirely predictable. It was predictable because it was in important respects stage managed by the police…. The state seeks to manipulate the media in order to protect the status quo from serious challenge. (Dan Hind, VersoBooks.com) I do think this focus on police infiltrators risks overemphasizing...
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The denials that the News of the World would be salacious which Murdoch made when he took over the paper in the social democratic era give way to neoliberalism’s claim to be only giving people what they want.

What may be even more damaging about the claim that the people “want” Murdoch-style tabloids is that the same argument is made by the defenders of the “quality” press. This claim is usually made in sorrow: once there was a time when the media gave people the informationpublic questioning they needed to know, but now commercial pressures encourage the media to give people only what they want. This ties in to a really pernicious idealization of the press, which sees the distraction and propaganda roles of the media as occasional deviations from its higher calling. On the contrary, it is the period in which the mainstream media was anything other than craven which is the aberration (lasting approximately the running time of All the President’s Men).

Furthermore, this idealization of the press proceeds via a denigration of the public. Setting up journalists as professionals willing to give people what they need, not what they want, takes what the public “wants” as fixed.But public wants all kind of different things, and, particularly, what’s visible in the public’s desires depends on all kinds of circumstances. It’s no accident that the periods in which American journalism has came closest to being the crusading institution it likes to imagine itself as have been periods of widespread and active public hostility to the establishment; that is, at times when the public wanted oppositional journalists. So, to the question that k-punk asks:

Neoliberalism has failed, the patrician culture it defeated cannot be revived, nor should it be – so where next?

I think the answer, at least in large part, lies outside the press, or perhaps in some kind of inside/outside strategy: external organizations which could both establish and take advantage of the kind of public culture that would make the public’s demand for serious media visible.

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3. No-​one cares about prop­erty damage Given the amount of time spent discussing the handful of bank windows smashed during Wednesday’s Oakland general strike, you might imagine that many people care about property damage; and yet, if you look for such people, who are they? Liberals complain about property damage during the various marches and actions,...

The coverage was almost entirely predictable. It was predictable because it was in important respects stage managed by the police…. The state seeks to manipulate the media in order to protect the status quo from serious challenge. (Dan Hind, VersoBooks.com)

I do think this focus on police infiltrators risks overemphasizing the agency of the state, and concomitantly underemphasizing the possibilities for resistance. First, it overemphasizes the ability of the police to produce “the extra-parliamentary left they want.” Mark Kennedy was undercover for years, but as far as we know didn’t manage to persuade anyone to be violent; can a couple of undercover agents joining a breakaway march of between 500 and a couple of thousand people really have had that much influence on what these demonstrators did?

Second, and maybe more importantly, the model of an active state “stage managing” a supine media misunderstands what’s wrong with the media. It’s a mistake to think that the media needs actual violent demonstrators to run with their “violent demonstrators” story. Just as a matter of maths, there will always be something on a demonstration that counts as “most violent,” even if its just someone dropping litter, and that will always be reported as “violent demonstrators.”

Third, images of violent confrontation are much more polysemic than this argument allows. Sure, they can be used to support a narrative that protesters are violent thugs who don’t need to be listened to, but they also send a message that police have lost control (which can itself be bad – leading to calls for more police powers – and good – encouraging further militant protest), and make visible, to those who are angry but haven’t acted, that they are not alone in their anger. And it’s this third point especially that leads me to agree with Dan’s conclusion:

If we want to do something about this, then we have to become more communicative. We need to start talking about our experiences and try to explain to others how far removed from reality media coverage can be. And we need to start the conversation about political economy that the country needs and that the political class is hellbent on avoiding.

Part of that conversation should touch on reform of the systems of communication on which we rely and which, as at the weekend, so regularly betray our trust. March 26th matters for many reasons. For one thing it reveals to those who were there the gap between reality and the news agenda. It is up to us now to explore that gap and to take steps to close it.

This is true, and it’s at least as true for those involved in black blocs and occupations as for those who remained on the permitted march.

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3. The perfect hero for America Your Ann Coulters and  Rush Limbaughs don’t like John McCain. They say it’s because he isn’t a real conservative, but I think there’s a better explanation, which is almost the opposite. The hardcore of the American right don’t like John McCain because he’s the perfect conservative candidate, and they’re jealous....

claims such as those published by the British journal The Lancet that American forces slaughtered hundreds of thousands are the real “attack on truth.”

Except that the Lancet study looked at excess mortality, it was never about whether these people were killed (still less “slaughtered”) by American troops. Or,

In Afghanistan, Wikileaks appears to have put the lives of courageous Afghans at risk, by identifying them as American sources.

A claim conveniently refuted by the Depatment of Defense.

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Consider, for example, welfare provision. The issue here is not simply one of more or less state support, but about how that support is provided. Conservatives don’t actually want (too many) people starving in the street; but they do want those who receive state support to be directly disciplined, probably by highly moralizing institutions (hence the conservative support for certain kinds of religious charity). Liberal welfare provision, on the other hand, requires that the recipients be disciplined by the amorphous institutions of the market. Thus raising the tax threshold is an eminently liberal policy, an attempt to improve the position of the poor by embedding them further in market mechanisms, not by limiting the influence of the market. In this context, Lib Dem skepticism about tax credits is rather baffling; perhaps the best example of a liberal welfare policy is Milton Friedman’s suggestion of a guaranteed minimum income, that is, a universal tax credit.

So a lot of what those of us on the left see as dismantling the welfare state may well be a restructuring which, from a liberal point of view, is entirely fair and progressive. The Lib Dem claims to have received concessions from the Tories aren’t desperate spin, they’re true, we just have to understand that what look like Tory policies are sometimes actually concessions to the Lib Dems. What gives the Lib/Con coalition the air of tragedy is that those concessions the Lib Dems have been able to wring from the Tories are of course precisely those that expose the limitations of liberal “fairness,” where the marketization of welfare emphasizes the marketization rather than the welfare. However, the fact that so many people experience the Lib Dem role in the government as a betrayal suggests they have a much more robust sense of what is genuinely progressive and fair than the Lib Dem leadership do.

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The English people believe they are free, but they are grossly mistaken. They are only so during the election of members of parliament. As soon as these have been elected, the people are immediately consigned to slavery, they are nothing. The way they use their freedom during the brief moment when they possess it means that they thoroughly deserve to lose it. (Rousseau)

The options in the constituency I’m eligible to vote in are sufficiently uninspiring that I didn’t get round to registering as an overseas voter, though now I rather wish I’d selected a proxy to spoil my ballot for me. Here’s hoping for an unexpectedly strong showing for “World Socialism.”

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The response to the failed pants bomb has at least provoked a bit of a backlash, although the focus on the privacy violations of the pants-scanning machines strikes me as misconceived. “Privacy” keeps getting construed as a mere matter of personal modesty, as if the point of rights was to avoid momentary embarrassment. But I don’t care if some security guy gets a quick peak at my cock, and you shouldn’t care either about the mere visibility of your quasi-naked body. The point of rights isn’t just to prevent us feeling uncomfortable, but to prevent against abuses of power, and there are potential abuses here; the scanners might be used to size up targets for various kinds of sexual harassment or assault, for instance, but most objections don’t seem to be couched in those terms. This is, perhaps, a logical endpoint of the concept of individual rights: when the concept of right is wholly wedded to the individual, it becomes impossible to imagine, not only forms of collective right or power, but to imagine even that these individual rights might have political significance.

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Just take a look at the funding for his campaign. I mean, the final figures haven’t come out, but we have preliminary figures, and it seems to be mostly financial institutions. I mean, the financial institutions preferred him to McCain. They are the main funders for both—you know, I mean, core funders for both parties, but considerably more to Obama than McCain.

There are a couple of ways of taking this. Usually, this kind of claim gets transformed into a claim that the majority of Obama’s funding came from financial institutions, and thus he’s been “bought.” This claim is, as far as I know, not true. The largest single organiztion collecting contributions for Obama’s compaign was actually the University of California; the second largest was Goldman Sachs, but Goldman’s fundraising efforts only contributed a little bit under a million dollars out of the $750 million the campaign collected.

This actually seems pretty understandible, because the idea that state power is bought by capitalists doesn’t really make sense: it’s already their state, so why would they spend money trying to acquire what they already control (if there’s one thing finance capital knows, its how to make a profitable investment). As is so often the case, the supposedly cynical position is actually a way of maintaining ones illusions: if the problem is the corruption of democracy by money, then there’s nothing essentially wrong with the institutions of American democracy. In fact, the situation is much worse than the cynics imagine, because capitalist control of the state is not “corruption”; it’s an essential (in fact, intentional) feature of the structure of bourgeois democracy.

The other way of interpreting the data on campaign contributions is somewhat more interesting, that we might look on these sums of money not as attempts to buy influence, but as expressions of support by different factions of capital, kind of like a very expensive bumper sticker.

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The New Labour project was always based on appealing to some imagined Dail Mail reader. But this fantasy now seems somehow too obvious, too desparate. What has happened to New Labour’s fantasy, to cause this collapse?

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