Future Tense

The Federal Trade Commission on Thursday unanimously cleared Google of charges that it has been stifling competition by manipulating its search results to promote its own products—such as its shopping, travel, and local results pages—above those of its rivals. It’s not that Google doesn’t ever manipulate its results in that way, FTC Chair Jon Leibowitz acknowledged. Rather, it’s that those search tweaks “could be plausibly justified as innovations that improved Google’s product and the experience of its users.”

In a press conference, Leibowitz cited the philosophy that U.S. antitrust law should be about “protecting competition, not competitors.” In other words, when Google searches bring up Google results, it may hurt Yahoo, but it doesn’t necessarily hurt the consumer, who could just as easily search Yahoo or Bing if she wanted different results. And the FTC bought Google’s argument that those biases in its search results could actually benefit users, by preventing other sites from gaming its system. By way of example, Leibowitz mentioned a 2011 New York Times article about how J. C. Penney used search-engine optimization tricks to bump its results to the top of Google’s results for everything from “dresses” to “area rugs.”

Of course, Google has plenty of ways to solve that problem, and bumping Google Shopping results to the top of the page is only the most self-serving of those options. So why did the FTC give Google the benefit of the doubt?

Because it recognizes that the Internet economy is seismically active. That was the big lesson of the Justice Department’s 1990s case against Microsoft, which looked like an indomitable fortress at the time, but whose foundations had begun crumbling even before the government rendered its antitrust verdict. Is Google exerting some monopolistic power today? Sure. But the barriers to entry in the information industry today are nothing like those of, say, the landline communications industry in the time of Ma Bell. Google’s lead in the Internet search market will last only as long as the public believes that Google delivers the best results. And even now, its power to use that lead to get a leg up in other sectors is far less than that of Microsoft in the 1990s. Whereas Microsoft used Windows to bludgeon some 75 percent of American Internet users into browsing the Web on its atrocious Internet Explorer, Google so far has failed to convince many people to switch from, say, Facebook to Google+. Meanwhile, rivals like Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, not to mention Microsoft, stand a fair chance of convincing more people to use their own search products in the years to come. In Leibowitz’s words, “It’s a dynamic industry, and you want to be careful before you apply sanctions.”

Exactly so. Which is why today’s FTC settlement makes perfect sense in today’s climate. Google didn’t get off the hook altogether. Under one of its two agreements with the FTC, it must license important patents to some of its smartphone rivals, which seems like a clear win for consumers. The other agreement requires it to give online advertisers more flexibility to use rival ad platforms. Google must also stop unilaterally scraping key information from other sites, like Yelp ratings of businesses, for use in its own results. Those concessions are in keeping with the new regulatory trend of poking big tech companies here and there to crack down on specific behaviors, as opposed to tackling them head-on as illegal monopolies.

As my colleague Farhad Manjoo wrote way back in 2009, “Prosecuting tech giants for getting too big is so last century.”

Josh Miller, the young Princeton dropout who co-founded the tech startup Branch, wrote a post last week that examined the social-media scene through the eyes of his 15-year-old sister. She told him that the photo-sharing service Instagram and the photo-messaging app Snapchat are the tools of choice, with more established sites like Facebook and Tumblr enjoying less cachet among her set. Here’s what she had to say to her older brother about Twitter:

Nobody uses it. I know you love it but I don’t get it. I mean, I guess a a few kids use it but they’re all the ones who won’t shut up in class, who always think they have something important to say.

That will probably come as news only to people who don’t use Twitter regularly. Compared to the highly visual and intimate feel of apps like Instagram and Snapchat, Twitter is text-heavy, impersonal, and resolutely public. It trades in wisecracks and news bites, not photos or flirting. But this dispatch from the halls of high school does reinforce the amazing alacrity with which Twitter has transitioned from next-big-thing startup to establishment-media player—bypassing the “cool with the kids” stage along the way. And if anecdotal evidence from one 15-year-old doesn’t do it for you, consider that a Pew survey in 2011 found just 16 percent of teens used Twitter, a rate not much higher than that of the overall population at the time.

So if the kids don’t use Twitter, who does? Well, world leaders, for one.  A new study by the Digital Policy Council finds that an overwhelming 75 percent of the world’s heads of state maintain accounts on the site. The rate for democratic countries is even higher: 87 percent.  And given how fast those numbers have been growing, the council estimates they will start to approach 100 percent before 2013 is out, rendering Twitter “a de facto communication tool for all heads of state.”

According to the study, the regions with the highest concentration of leaders using the site are Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.  How many of those leaders actually craft their own tweets, the study does not say.

Now for the fun part: a ranking of the top heads of state on Twitter, based on follower count as of December 2012:

1. Barack Obama - United States - 24.6 million
2. Hugo Chavez - Venezuela - 3.8 million
3. Abdullah Gul - Turkey - 2.6 million
4. Rania Al Abdullah - Jordan - 2.5 million
5. Dmitry Medvedev - Russia - 2 milllion
6. Dilma Rousseff - Brazil - 1.8 million
7. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner - Argentina - 1.5 million
8. Juan Manuel Santos - Colombia - 1.5 million
9. Enrique Pena Nieto - Mexico - 1.4 million
10. Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum - UAE - 1.3 million

The full report is available here.

It’s 2013, people—we are living in the future. Since the news is still awash with problems we created for ourselves decades or centuries ago (the permanent fiscal crisis, gun control, the political powder-keg that is the Middle East), it may have escaped your notice that today is also National Science Fiction Day.

While you may still be rooting through your holiday gift pile searching for that long-promised jetpack, science fiction writers actually had some grim things to say about 2013. Jack London pegged the coming year for the arrival of the Red Death, a new pandemic. Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly guessed one in five Americans would be hooked on illegal drugs (and if you count criminal hypocrisy, he would not be wrong).* And David Brin pretty much called the whole civilizational ballgame with The Postman, imagining a postapocalyptic hellscape in which only Kevin Costner fans could survive.

And yet, so far, we are 2 for 2 on the world not ending in 2013. So let’s take a minute to celebrate the idea behind National Science Fiction Day as embodied by the writer and scientist whose birthday it marks, Isaac Asimov. Science and the stories of science that Asimov loved to tell are going strong.

In 2012 we watched the Mars rover Curiosity and its spunky band of rock star engineers explore the red planet, saw the Higgs boson emerge from the ether, traced Felix Baumgartner’s 24-mile space-dive, and followed James Cameron seven miles down into the Mariana Trench. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ helped us share details, rumors, and excitement about these momentous events worldwide. The social media buzz surrounding these events were part of what the New York Times has called “an epidemic of science geekiness” that put millions in contact with the latest news from labs and research missions around the world. It also felt like the year in which science became a like-button topic, a zone of what I call “butterfly engagement” in which you watch a short video, share it with your friends, and move on to the next shiny (or levitating) thing.

Now, I’m all for this kind of enthusiastic conversation about science, but we also need interactions that last longer than a few minutes. It’s not the fault of scientists (or science writers) that social media naturally encourage slacktivism, in which clicking a button or signing a virtual petition take the place of more substantive forms of engagement. But the rush to amass eyeballs and retweets runs the risk of eliding any actual thinking for the sake of special effects and sound-bites.

This brings us back to Asimov, a guy who took the long view about science and human progress, perhaps most memorably in his Foundation series, which traced the long arc of human history across millennia. What Asimov knew about science fiction, and science writing in general, is that a good story sticks with you in part because it takes time to tell, and time to absorb.

Fortunately, I think the Internet offers its own antidote to slacktivism in the form of deeper dives: extended conversations, curated archives, long reads, and long tails. The same technologies that can cue up 60 episodes of The Wire on a moment’s notice can also deliver extended meditations on Asimov’s future history, habitable worlds, and thoughtful dialogues about the world we ought to make for ourselves.

So why not make this the first day of 2013 that you spend living in a science fiction era? Let social media guide you to the incredible things humans are achieving on and off this planet, and then let science fiction and the deep riches of digital culture guide you to some new ideas, some better dreams, and better futures.

Correction, Jan. 3, 2013: This article originally and incorrectly said that Philip K. Dick’s fiction predicted one in five Americans would be hooked on illegal drugs by 2013. In fact, his novel is set in 1994 and makes no such prediction. The statistic about 20 percent usage in 2013 comes from Richard Linklater’s film adaptation of Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly.

Armed robbers hit an Apple Store in Paris on New Year’s Eve, making off with $1.3 million in iPhones, iPads and laptops. That’s a lot, but it’s actually less than the $1.5 million in iPad minis that thieves nabbed from New York’s JFK Airport in November. Then again, it’s far more than a pair of bungling burglars got from a Temecula, California Apple Store in September, when they rammed the entrance with a BMW, then got stuck on the way out.

Is this some sort of trend? Foreign Policy’s Joshua Keating thinks so. He adds the high-profile break-ins to numbers that show a big spike in street thefts of Apple products and asks if we’re in the midst of a global Apple crime wave. Before you scoff, consider that just last week New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg blamed iPhone thefts for a rise in his city’s overall crime rate. He pointed out that Apple product thefts were up by an amazing 3,890 in the city in 2012. If Apple-related crimes had just held steady, the number of total major crimes in New York would have actually been slightly down for the year.

"Global crime wave" is obviously an overstatement. The public (and media) fascination with Apple products probably makes these thefts more visible than they would be otherwise. Burglars hit Best Buys all the time, but when they knock off an Apple Store it makes bigger headlines. Still, there is some evidence that thieves aren't just swiping any old gadget they can get their hands on. Keating cites reports that suggest Apple product thefts dip noticeably in the week before a big new product launch, suggesting that thieves hold out for the hot new toy just like the rest of us. (The Temecula idiots are an exception.)

None of this is to say that Apple products are a menace to public safety—just that, like car stereos and cigarettes, they are ubiquitous, easy to pilfer, and offer great resale value relative to their size and weight, making them an ideal target for the discerning crook. Unlike, say, books.

There is plenty to dislike about the last-minute fiscal-cliff deal that Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell hashed out on New Year’s Eve. But the technology and energy provisions are bright spots.

The deal, passed by the House on Tuesday, extends the research-and-development tax credit through 2013, helping to preserve the jobs of high-skill researchers working on tomorrow’s technologies and scientific advances. As Obama said in his remarks Tuesday night, “We can't keep cutting things like basic research and new technology and still expect to succeed in a 21st century economy.”

Likewise, the deal will preserve for at least one more year the wind energy production tax credit, staving off cuts that would have severely undermined the nation’s fastest-growing energy source.  In fact, as Reuters points out, much damage has already been done merely by last year’s controversy over the tax credit’s future. Despite a record year in which wind power contributed more new capacity to America’s domestic energy mix than any other source, including natural gas, political uncertainty prompted layoffs at major manufacturers in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Iowa. (Mitt Romney may have appreciated wind jobs in Iowa, but he wasn’t about to lift a finger to preserve them.) Still, the one-year extension will prevent far deeper job losses, with a trade group estimating that it will save some 37,000 jobs in the first quarter of 2013 alone.

As those figures suggest, wind power is no longer an insignificant bit player on the nation’s energy scene. The Department of Energy estimates that it has the potential to supply as much as 20 percent of the country’s electricity by 2030. Now the trick is to build more lasting policies that give the industry some assurance about its future, so that it doesn’t have to lay off and then rehire workers every year. The trade group has asked for the credit to be phased out over five years beginning in 2014, which seems like a reasonable solution. Admittedly, reasonable solutions don’t seem to be Congress’ strong suit these days.

One of Shell's resolutions for 2013 is to expand its controversial drilling operations in untapped Arctic waters. It's off to a bad start.

On Monday, the 266-foot drilling rig the Kulluk broke free from tow lines in stormy seas and ran aground on a small island near Kodiak, Alaska, the Los Angeles Times reports. It had first snapped free on Thursday on its way back to port in Seattle after drilling test wells in the Arctic earlier last year. The rig's 17 workers were lifted to safety by Coast Guard helicopters Thursday, and the tow lines were reattached over the weekend as storms continued. But on Monday, amid 70-mph winds and 40-foot waves, the lines were disconnected again to avoid danger to the crew of the tow ship.

The rig is carrying about 139,000 gallons of diesel fuel, but so far the Coast Guard has not detected any spills, according to the New York Times. Still, the incident is another blow to Shell's Arctic drilling program, which was already delayed last year due to a separate accident. Conservation groups have seized on the incidents as evidence that the program is too perilous, both to the crew of the ships and to the Arctic environment.

Most Twitter users try to ignore messages from robot accounts. But maybe we should be putting bots to work for a more noble cause—democracy.

One estimate holds that 75 percent of all Twitter traffic is generated by the most active users—about 5 percent of Twitter accounts. One-third of those active users are believed to be machine bots tweeting more than 150 times a day. Because some bots generate fewer than 150 tweets a day, the actual number of bot-held accounts is probably higher. In fact, as many as one-quarter of all tweets made in an average day may come from bot accounts.

Most of these crafty bots generate inane commentary and try to sell stuff, but some are given political tasks. For example, pro-Chinese bots have clogged Twitter conversations about the conflict in Tibet. In Mexico’s recent presidential election, the political parties played with campaign bots on Twitter. And even an aspiring parliamentarian in Britain turned to bots to appear popular on social media during his campaign. Furthermore, the Chinese, Iranian, Russian, and Venezuelan governments employ their own social media experts and pay small amounts of money to large numbers of people (“50 cent armies”) to generate pro-government messages, if inefficiently.

During the Cold War, Western diplomats smuggled fax machines to the democracy advocates behind the Iron Curtain. For a while now, we've been sending satellite phones to activists leaders who need help organizing supporters. But we aren’t yet taking advantage of Twitter robots. Let’s put those tools to work promoting democratic values, expanding the news diets of people in other countries, and critiquing tough dictators.

The way Russians, Iranians, and Chinese use their social media in different ways, so there needs to be care with messaging and targeting. The Iranian blogosphere is full of poets. The Russian blogosphere has lots of nationalists. So our democracy bots need to be engaging, and promote stories about what life is like in countries where freedom and faith coexist. Or the tweets could provide links to news stories and cultural content that engages particular social networks. The task of such bots would not be to send pro-Western messages to the accounts of anti-Western tweeters. Instead, it would be to send links about life in countries with peace, order, and good governance to moms blogging about their parenting troubles, students getting caught up in the Eurovision contest, and government workers reading online news from sources outside their country.

It would be toughest to turn our bots on Chinese Internet users, most of whom are not linked up to global information infrastructure in the way the rest of us are. This makes it difficult for large amounts of content to flow between China and the rest of the world. Most Chinese use QQ and Weibo, the Facebook and Twitter equivalents. Accounts on these sites have to be validated by a real person before they get permission to launch pre-formulated messages on a programmed schedule. So someone in China might have to take personal risks in letting democracy robots lose. Or a hacktivist would have to exploit some zero-day vulnerability—we know there is a market for information about those secret vulnerabilities.

Inevitably, this will result in some sort of Twitter war of the robots, some promoting democracy, some decrying it. I suppose anti-democracy robots can target their own citizens at home or abroad, but they would probably have little impact on the people living in democracies. Sure, maybe this will clog up Twitter a bit. But we need a strategic response to 50-cent armies and the existing authoritarian bots. Not putting the robots to work for democracy is the more dangerous strategy.

2012’s sci-fi cinema was a bit of a mixed bag: We had the widely appealing Hunger Games and the clever Looper, but also the dud John Carter.

Online, however, a number of sci-fi shorts with impressive production values raised important questions about augmented reality, constant surveillance, space exploration, robots with heart, and other technology topics that raise tricky questions for society and policymakers. Below, find the top six narrative sci-fi videos from 2012. Many are proof-of-concepts from special effects shops, so there are some dazzling visuals to behold. Celebrate the new year with stories that will make you dread the future—in a good way.

“Archetype”
Special-effects maestro Aaron Sims wanted to make a movie about robots. To pique Hollywood’s interest, he first created this short, in which a newly “born” robot appears to have real human memories. The project paid off: After the video went viral, producer John Davis acquired the rights to “Archetype.”

Issues explored: Human-robot interaction, creating a mind

Run time: 7:02

“Tempo”

The tempo device can make an object accelerate or decelerate with the push of a button—and it would make a mighty fine weapon. So of course the bad guys want to take it from the genial scientists.

While most of the other shorts here have a video game feel and are light on conversation, “Tempo” has a dash of dark humor and smart dialogue. But there’s still plenty of guns.

Issues explored: Military technology, ethics of technological innovation

Run time: 13:52

“Sight”
Augmented-reality contacts make life more fun—and not a little creepy—in this short created by Israeli students Daniel Lazo and Eran May-raz.

Issues explored: Augmented reality, online dating, gamification, technology etiquette, online advertising

Run time: 7:50

“Memorize”
In this Minority Report-inspired shoot-‘em-up short (with a sprinkle of Judge Dredd), the government requires all Americans to be implanted with a device that not only identifies them, but records everything they do and see. Note that despite this remarkable advance in technology, the protagonist still drives his own car.

Issues explored: augmented reality, crime fighting, civil rights, spam bots (real ones—a robot with an Eastern European machine accent advertises “Happy Pillz”), embedded identification chips

Run time: 7:12

“Seed”
Set in 2071, this quiet and moody 13-minute film shows a lonely explorer conducting reconnaissance on Gaia, a rocky, moon-esque planet slated for possible colonization. Then something goes wrong.

Issues explored: Space colonization

Run time: 13:40

“Gamma”
After a “nuclear decade” of war left cities around the world too irradiated for human life (except for the stalwarts who refused to evacuate), a company called Gamma creates a method to cleanse urban zones. In Eastern Europe, they deploy “nuke roots”—hybrids of fungi and mollusks—to scarf up the radiation. Once they’ve done their duty, the “nuke roots” are supposed to be buried safely so humans can return. But something goes wrong. (Doesn’t it always?)

Issues explored: Nuclear war, corporate mistrust, premature deployment of untested technologies

Run time: 6:47