Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Clickbait, Clickfraud, and the Open Internet

The issue of pervasive web traffic fraud has finally made it to the cover of Business Week, a couple years after the story began re-emerging in the advertising and technology trade press.

Late that year he and a half-dozen or so colleagues gathered in a New York conference room for a presentation on the performance of the online ads. They were stunned. Digital’s return on investment was around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV. The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people.

“The room basically stopped,” Amram recalls. The team was concerned about their jobs; someone asked, “Can they do that? Is it legal?” But mostly it was disbelief and outrage. “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,” Amram says. “As an advertiser we were paying for eyeballs and thought that we were buying views. But in the digital world, you’re just paying for the ad to be served, and there’s no guarantee who will see it, or whether a human will see it at all.”

…

Increasingly, digital ad viewers aren’t human. A study done last year in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers embedded billions of digital ads with code designed to determine who or what was seeing them. Eleven percent of display ads and almost a quarter of video ads were “viewed” by software, not people. According to the ANA study, which was conducted by the security firm White Ops and is titled The Bot Baseline: Fraud In Digital Advertising, fake traffic will cost advertisers $6.3 billion this year.

…

There’s also the possibility that the multitudes of smaller ad tech players will get serious about sanitizing their traffic. Walter Knapp, CEO of Sovrn Holdings, a programmatic exchange, says he was as alarmed as anyone at the rise of ad fraud. He decided it was a matter of survival. “There are 2,000 ad tech companies, and there is maybe room for 20,” he says. “I looked around and said, ‘This is bulls—.’ ”

About 18 months ago, he set to figuring out how much of his inventory—ad spaces for sale—was fake. The answer mortified him: “Two-thirds was either fraud or suspicious,” he says. He decided to remove all of it. “That’s $30 million in revenue, which is not insignificant.” Sovrn’s business eventually returned to, and then surpassed, where it was with the bad inventory. Knapp says his company had a scary few months, though, and he keeps part of a molar on his desk as a memento. “I was clenching it so hard, I cracked it in half,” he says.

This is a link to one of the white papers cited in the article.

There are both technological and economic factors behind this waste. On the technological side, the entire notion of targeting individuals with browser-based advertising assumes that when something that looks like a computer browser renders some Javascript — or at least creates the appearance of rendering that Javascript — it’s equivalent to a human viewing the ad. It’s also possible in many cases to spoof that process at scale.

This differs from the procedure in print media in a critical way. Each subscriber (apart from the relatively small number of people who buy publications from the news stand) is a validated subscriber. They verify their identity by sending money to the publisher. Professional publishers then pay a third party auditing firm to verify that their subscriber lists are accurate. This verification tells advertisers that, although they may not know how many people actually see the ads, they can at least know that the publisher’s lists are accurate. Subscribers will also presumably cancel their subscription or complain if they are unhappy with either the editorial or advertising content of the publication.

With the web, publishers have no such pressure from subscribers. Their chief pressure is increasing un-audited or lightly audited traffic numbers as measured through the proxy of the web browser. Users have a great deal of control over what runs in their browsers, which is why ad blockers are so popular.

Publishers do have some incentive to control the quality of the ads that show up — there’s an entire cottage profession dedicated to manually and programatically filtering ads that come in through a network — but filtering the quality of traffic is basically only pressured by how well the ad network regulates things, through some combination of manually blacklisting publishers and automatically filtering suspicious traffic.

This overhead slows down page speed at least somewhat, because ad networks tend not to trust the publishers. Validating that visitors are likely to be real people is not cost-free: it costs processing power ,and must lock itself in a competition with developers eager to spoof the validation mechanisms.

The other difficulty is that, owing to weak security on personal computers, plenty of legitimate users themselves own machines which are doing part-time work for a botnet. Anyone technically proficient who has had to help out a ‘regular’ person clean their personal computer knows that this is a pervasive problem.

Part of this problem derives from the ideology that information on the world wide web wants to be ‘free.’ What we see is that people who leave their web servers wide-open don’t have much of an incentive to manage what software runs on pages being served from their machines in a way that best serves the interests of guests connecting to those servers.

So, rather than treating each guest to the server as either a customer or potential customer, free websites will tend to do what they can to spy on their guests on behalf of third parties who will attempt to leverage this information to persuade them to buy things or take certain actions. ‘Free’ media websites tend to abuse their visitors the most because they have little incentive to align themselves with the long term interests of their guests. The only incentive is building a base of repeat visitors who match the demographic target profile that advertisers are looking for — but those profiles can be spoofed, and often are spoofed, because they’re not financially validated or auditable in the conventional way.

It’s much more efficient just to have advertisers work from profiles of subscribers who willingly give up the relatively basic information that’s typically demanded: age, income level, marital status, homeowner status, zip code, and some other particulars dependent on a given market. What’s not needed is a massive spy’s dossier on every person that connects to a server to download a web page. The proof of this is in the price that advertisers are willing to pay for validated audiences in print against semi-validated audiences on the internet. Person for person, print tends to pay many multiples of what gets paid on the internet — and the same goes for cable television as compared to digital television. Prices condense a lot of information about markets.

The quality of the information being served by the free companies also must decline over time, because validating that information is costly — too costly for the profit margins of the media companies to bear. Much like a sugar-snacks conglomerate, the company has an incentive to make the product as stimulating and addictive as possible while minimizing the nutritional content, up to the point to which consuming the product damages the health of the customers.

On the macroeconomic side of things, we have a monetary environment that supports these kinds of business models — which also emerged and collapsed in the previous ‘internet bubble’ — really a phenomenon of money and credit more than of ‘irrational exuberance’  — propping up far more of these middle-man companies than would be surviving otherwise. Artificially easy credit sustains companies which would otherwise fail, because it’s easier for them to raise funds or otherwise borrow money than would be possible in a more natural situation. What happens is that companies that want to compete on legitimate grounds wind up unable to compete without themselves participating in cannibalistic, parasitic market practices.

On the publishing side, the publishers can’t compete unless they buy traffic from dubious sources and use whichever ad networks provide the highest bids. The ad networks themselves may or may not be able to validate the quality of the traffic they’re serving ads against, because they’re participating in exchanges which are difficult to police. And naturally, government regulators are mostly oblivious to the issue, lacking the means, technical expertise, or incentive to police those global markets.

The takeaway will be, I expect, that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, and the internet is not a special place where great things can be had entirely for free indefinitely. Web sites will increasingly resemble storefronts because maintaining them as ‘commons’ has become increasingly costly owing to this arms race of parasitism.

What that also means is that a large portion of the capital structure built up in the latest part of the boom cycle is proving to be uneconomical and will have to be liquidated or reorganized.

This is a good roundup of the numbers.

Consumers are increasingly opting out of running ads on their browsers and blocking trackers because they dislike the business practices followed by free website operators. This will run them out of business, which is a good thing.

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Come To the Dark Side

Avi Woolf, English language editor of Mida, an Israeli news & commentary site, is concerned about the direction that the American right is headed.

For fun, let’s look at how Mida describes its mission.

Mida is a news and intellectual website which aims to present the public with information and opinions not common in the Israeli media.

To paraphrase a famous quote: “Nothing national is alien to us”. We cover economics, defense, education, culture, academia, law, Zionism, Judaism, history, philosophy, art and more. Our purpose is to provide readers with new information on Israel, expose them to current events and thought from around the world and examine current public policy in a variety of fields as well as offer alternatives.

Our values can best be described as “classical liberal” or “conservative liberal”. We see individual freedom as a uniquely Western political achievement, one earned through personal responsibility and civic involvement. Alongside this, we recognize that elections alone are not enough for a democracy which ensures individual freedom; it must be supported by a coherent social identity and corresponding institutions, the most important of which are nationalism and religion. To us, voluntary and spontaneous civilian institutions are infinitely preferable to a Leviathan-like state awash in resources but harming individual and economic freedoms.

‘Mida’ aims to take a sober view of reality. We are driven by realism: we recognize that even though culture and values have a role in shaping history, it is mostly “fear, honor and interest” which drive the day-to-day agenda. We aim to be as faithful as possible to the facts instead of theories and wishful thinking.

I added the bolding for emphasis. I can’t read Hebrew, so most of what’s on the site is unintelligible to me.

Anyway, Avi wants you to know that discussing genetics is bad, wrong, and will lead to Hitler.

Contrary to common misconception, those beliefs never disappeared. Yes, the Holocaust drove them underground, and Buckley managed to briefly drive them from respectable right-wing circles. But if the rise of Trump and the shrill cry of Coulter make anything clear, it is that these views are back with a vengeance. You see it in a thousand different terms throughout the internet: HBD, evolutionary theory, you name it. We are back to ranking human worth by genetic “fitness” — almost exclusively intellectual fitness. And, of course, the question of racial intellectual fitness.

People will argue that I am not a scientist, and that I am not competent to judge whether the claims made in these studies on group differences in IQ are correct or not. They are right — and they are missing the point by a mile and a half. The principle of human moral equality is not — must not — ever be dependent on an IQ or a genetics fitness test. It is axiomatic, the bedrock of liberal democratic society however conceived; it is the life’s blood of the Enlightenment at its…well, most enlightened, whether you are left or right wing.

There’s a lot that’s muddled in this post, and I’ll be charitable to the author and assume that he assembled it without much detailed thinking.

I think a key question to ask is whether or not ‘liberal democratic society’ is something that conservatives ought to support. Historically, they didn’t. The founding fathers didn’t support a liberal democratic society, either, and the notion of moral equality meant something different to them than it means to us. And on the historical scale, the founding fathers were barking-mad liberal revolutionaries who flouted the law.

Liberal, maybe. Democratic, not so much. What Locke meant by moral equality is not the usage which Woolf promotes in this post. And Locke, more than anyone, propelled the American rebellion.

Moral equality certainly didn’t mean at the time that all lives have equal moral weight, regardless of what people do with their essential human freedom. The saint isn’t morally equivalent to the adulterer, and the murderer isn’t morally equivalent to the ordinary citizen. Locke spoke of an equality in moral powers. And even Locke the liberal saw nothing wrong in the exclusionary principle (from §. 95 of the first Treatise):

The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community, for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any, that are not of it.

This is less a uniquely liberal principle and more one of basic political sense. The capacity of a government or community to secure its own existence isn’t unlimited. Some people must be excluded for that “comfortable, safe, and peaceable living” to be maintained.

So, for example, Israel wisely excludes Palestinians and heavily armed Nazis from much of Israel. If Israel instead decided that it was to become a true light unto all the nations and accept anyone who showed up as a citizen with full voting rights, there would be no Zionist state to speak of after a short and bloody collapse.

Further, Wolf confuses which side of the political spectrum that movements like nationalism and eugenics actually came from. Eugenics was a prime method used by the progressive movement in its attempts to engineer a higher quality population. This isn’t particularly concealed in the historic record. It’s confused in popular discourse because the left tends to ascribe policies from the past which it disowns today onto its enemies whenever possible, and to drown out knowledge with noisy ignorance when it’s not.

Nationalism of the 1848 variety was also recognized as a leftist movement, in large part because it was in explicit rebellion against the ancient political order of Europe. In America, the poles are a little bit flipped, because our revolution was itself an early strain of nationalist revolution fought on populist grounds.

Even further, it takes a special muddle-mindedness to write for a happily Zionist publication, from a nation that openly discriminates against non-Jews in its immigration and domestic policies, to then proclaim exclusionary principles are dangerous paths for Americans to go down.

This isn’t an especially unusual muddle-mindedness, either, in part because the post-war historians have made it a special project to declare the Jewish people and Israel as morally unique, and permitted special moral privileges that set them apart from the rest of humanity. This then sets them, in particular, up for this sort of unique muddle, in which a writer proclaims that all people are morally equal while also arguing that some groups of people are morally unequal.

There is nothing “obvious” here. Conservatives above all people should know just how powerful the dark side of human nature is — including the desire to find any excuse to dehumanize and degrade the moral worth of others given half a chance. Anyone who thinks they can go about celebrating the relative inferiority and superiority of groups without horrific backlash is either a fool or evil. There is no third option.

…

The question of genetic ability can and should be grappled with in terms of the question of meritocracies, of assigning jobs and the like. In fact, I welcome serious discussion among the right as a whole on the issue which exemplifies the tradition of the (morally) best of us. But I greatly fear that the poison underneath, the darker, hateful and misanthropic assumptions of conservative thought threaten to destroy a movement I have spent years fighting for — and hope to continue fighting for in the future.

I hope I am proven wrong.

Appealing to sober realism, humans aren’t uniform. Genetics doesn’t stop influencing the human animal from the neck up. Celebrating the superiority of a national group — of which common blood is a common part — is close to a human universal. Israelis definitely do it all the time. It’s not an especially horrible practice. Folk dances and queer local celebrations are not on the same level as Genghis Khan slaughtering a large portion of China.

Nor is recognizing the heredity principle, which long predated Darwin. Proclaiming that heredity only affects things like hair color is itself an unusual and recent doctrine.

Given that humans are impacted by heredity as much as other animals are, it’s actually a strong argument against an enormous ‘meritocratic’ sorting mechanism. Families themselves do that naturally. The part where we should depart from Lockean arguments against divine rights of kings is that moral powers are themselves not as equally distributed as we might have hoped. This is perhaps the source of apocalypse-level concern from Woolf and writers like him: that people are very much unequal in every respect, and that the sort of extreme equality doctrine which people have attempted to establish in the West is actually quite fragile and at odds with the underlying reality of nature.

Again, we have conservatives angling to conserve the mentally feeble postwar doctrines of universal-brotherhood-of-man — with unprincipled exceptions attached. If that is what they’re conserving, they deserve the destruction — as a movement — which Woolf fears.

If the universal-brotherhood-of-man-genetic-uniformity doctrine is so delicate that some prodding around could cause it to explode into universal warfare, then perhaps it was not such a sensible doctrine to attempt to protect, given that it’s neither true nor stable. It’s also an ignoble lie that causes people to make gross errors at every level. This causes phenomenal waste.

It’s also false that this doctrine has deeper roots in classical liberalism. It has very shallow roots. It’s a confused amalgamation of half-baked thought. Affirming the exclusionary principle is less an issue of “hate” and “poison” and more a matter of attempting to preserve civil society against its enemies. To the extent that we can no longer form a government together owing to serious differences between peoples within those states, we should reform it until we can establish order.

Panicked arguments that the exploration of genetics will cause neo-Hitler to rise again are themselves the enemies of clear thought on these issues. It also lends credence to people who would actually like a neo-Hitler to pop up again, just because of the hysterical attempts to suppress the publication of simple truths. By discrediting sober-minded and prestigious scientists in an attempt to buttress stupid and wasteful political doctrines, the Responsible People have given credence to fringe figures who are willing to be public enemies.

Ending that suppression would cut off that air supply. Speaking the truth generates legitimacy. If you make speaking the truth something that only rebels can do, you lend legitimacy to your own enemies, because when  your enemies speak obvious truths, the people will tend to be drawn towards their banners and away from yours.

But doing so would provoke a wave of resentment and anger that would be difficult for our incumbent Responsible People to survive. It would also be a sort of betrayal of all the client peoples which the Great, Responsible, Beautiful people have promised to uplift — which they’ll never be able to.

The notion of universal inclusion is itself counter to the classical liberal tradition and really any tradition in political thought as it has been actually applied. The Tower of Babel didn’t last for long. Neither will this one.

What is causing the backlash is the attempt to suppress the totally ordinary attempt of people to cooperate to exclude people who are not compatible with political order and prosperity. Disrupting that behavior causes the resentment, and rightly so.

Filed Under: HBD

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Cause & Effect

The lower-order effects of bad policies tend to be both obvious and frustrating. Mass unemployment is a lower-order effect with complex higher causes. Part of the business of democratic politics is providing pat, limited explanations for those pernicious and painful effects that makes the issues less messy and comprehensible in as simple a model as is possible for the average person to understand. Once that person comes to believe that they understand both cause and effect, they can be militated in favor of some political cause or another.

The truth content of the entire exercise doesn’t really matter — the lower-order effects might only exist in the media, and the causes identified might be entirely irrelevant to the purported effects.

Here’s a fictional one:

C02 emissions caused by humans/livestock → Melting polar icecaps & glaciers → Arctic polar bears must flee south → Polar bears die tragically fleeing climate change → You have a moral obligation to reduce emissions to save the innocent polar bears.

None of this needs to be true for it to be effective as a political narrative. In fact, the less verifiable that it is, the better, and so long as it seems compelling and urgent, the masses will rush to support a story which is emotionally compelling but false than they will be willing to support a story which is emotionally inert but true.

The challenge with addressing real root causes of real problems is that in the political realm, the causes are likely to be fractal rather than something that can be easily reduced to a soundbite. Unlike in the laboratory environment, in which the complexity of nature can be reduced and controlled, chaos is the rule outside the lab, and establishing a clear causal chain is extremely challenging or impossible.

That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to establish causality or to bring order to nature. Specialized knowledge and specialization in labor is how civilization tames different natural spheres. Transforming coal into usable electricity is possible thanks to the engineering discipline, and extracting that coal is feasible thanks to the discipline of mining. Specialized financial knowledge is necessary to coordinate those disparate stages of production. Political knowledge is necessary to keep the miners from slaughtering their bosses and vice-versa. This complexity is what Hayek wrote about in “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

While the title is about knowledge, knowledge isn’t necessarily what people have trouble with — it’s the acknowledgment of ignorance which is more challenging, as is the admission that some mysteries are unsolvable. But leaving some areas mysterious is uncomfortable — we want to convince ourselves that we know what’s going on with the world, that we understand more than we do, that we can predict more than can be predicted. It’s a source of consolation. The danger of this innate human tendency tends to become more severe when we attempt to simplify the impossibly complex in human affairs to generate that palliative effect. We create entire sky-castles of breezy causal reasoning chains which rely on models of things that can’t be modeled, attempting to rationalize things that reason tells us can’t be subjected to that sort of rationalization.

The 20th century approach to liberal arts education has mostly been a creation of head-stuffing — encouraging students to memorize these sorts of pat reasoning chains so that they can buttress more political interventions and the growth of bureaucratic management. These stories are often supported by emotionally powerful tales that lend them some shrill urgency. Professors test for ideological conformity and passion, because knowing the party line and truly believing it generates a reliable sense of legitimacy for the state. This method is common to all rationalist politics regardless of what position the ideology has on the ‘spectrum.’

This differs from the classical liberal arts, which were heavy on the transmission of cultural experience from thousands of years of Western history. Rather than the reduction of history to the pat reasoning of a small number of liberals thinking over a short period of time, it was more about 1,000s of years of history recorded to the best of our ability. Students would then go on to further studies in their specialization. And those students were not the bulk of society — not even the bulk of the intelligent — but a tiny fraction of the elite.

Egalitarian political systems — like the United States after Andrew Jackson expanded the franchise — tend to be uncomfortable with gross disparities in knowledge, especially the kind which is supposed to elevate the student politically over others which the ideology considers politically equal. Simplifying the incredibly complex makes it easier for people who aren’t equal to see one another as equals, to maintain a pretense of egalitarianism, and the ability of an ordinary person to grasp the whole of human experience rather than only a tiny portion of it.

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