Particularly among those of us who grew up without the privilege of coming out without fear of being rejected, being LGBTQ+ is about trying to understand who you are and how you fit in a world that wasn’t made for you. As soon as we understand we’re different from others, we have to decide how to try to cope and survive to the best of our abilities. It forces us to create a mask early on and get used to the idea that a facial expression, a hand gesture, a wrong or unconvincing answer can be dangerous.

Some of us, despite our effort to grow and unlearn things we picked up to survive, always carry a sense of loss or inadequacy. At least that’s how I’ve felt for a long time, wanting to bond with others but instinctively afraid to let my guard down. I’ve always struggled to actually get that sense of community that has been talked about so much, something that can be a group of friends and acquaintances sharing and learning from their common experiences but also a support network, helping each other in times of need and serving as a reminder that one is not alone when facing the world.

When I moved to Madrid from Venezuela in 2019, I thought I would find meaning. After all, many queer Latin Americans tend to put the country of Almodóvar and García Lorca in a high regard when it comes to tolerance. Instead, I got long evenings in bars in Chueca, Madrid’s gay district, walking around trying to meet someone’s glance or sitting in locales that were too loud and crowded and that made me feel lonely and unsure. It made me think that perhaps, in some way, it was too late for me.

Then COVID-19 came and changed the world in ways we thought were impossible. Suddenly, everyone struggled with one of the most basic parts of life that also was one of the most affected by the pandemic: human interaction. Queer people, like everyone else, looked for alternatives to the closed gay bars, nightclubs, bookstores and community centers. For individuals who don’t feel safe in their households or immediate surroundings, those spaces can be lifesaving; for me, who never found his place in those spaces to begin with, their closures felt like even more missed opportunities.

From my rented bedroom in Madrid, what was originally declared as a two-week lockdown became a month, and then several months, with no end in sight. Friends became little squares on Zoom with names, and some, from college, led me to the mixed blessing that is Discord.

Released in 2015, Discord was originally envisioned as a voice and text chat platform for gamers. I don’t often play video games, but my college friends, spread over four different countries, mostly used it to watch movies and play online games once or twice a week.

I had already been familiar with Discord because many LGBTQ+ communities on Reddit also had their own channels (called servers) on it, though they were less active before the pandemic. Once I joined, I found myself browsing all types of channels and connecting with people from Oslo to Bahra in to Palm Beach to Rio de Janeiro.

We would video chat, play games, watch movies or shows and, every now and then, have a bit of naughty fun. Quite a few left their camera on while cooking, working or sleeping. Anything to feel a bit less lonely.

I was drawn to the conversation. It was nice having someone to talk to, even if it was about unimportant, everyday stuff. I could see most people also had come to Discord for the same reasons and around the same time I did. Time zones didn’t matter, nor usually did labels such as gay, bi, cis, non-binary or trans. We all remained there because we needed it. It was something we lost or never had in the first place: a space, real or virtual, for people like us.

Online spaces are nothing new, of course. Especially for people of my generation and younger—in other words, Millennials and Zoomers—they have been, for better or for worse, a playground detached from prying eyes and suffocating environments during our developing years.

As anyone who has been part of an online community knows, there’s often a dark side to them, too, and Discord is not an exception. The very same platform that was allowing me to talk and share with queer people of every stripe and color has also been used by white supremacists, including those who organized the Charlottesville Rally, before a crackdown in 2017. But when you feel alone in the world, everywhere feels like a potential risk.

I guess what made Discord unique for me was how easy it was to be part of a community or start one of your own, with enough people to make new, lively groups and enough servers that no one community feels overwhelming. Most of my friends and coworkers are straight and they are very important to me. Still, logged onto the Discord servers, I felt I was having conversations I always dreamed of having but never engaged in, in part because of my own fears. The idea that you’re not alone within the LGBTQ+ community rang true for the first time in my life.

There was a certain equality in our solitude, from the rich, white middle-aged gay guy chatting in a fancy apartment to the blue-collar dark-skinned trans kid listening from their retail job. There was an ephemeral element to it that made the experience feel bittersweet but overall, I believe that’s for the best.

More than a second virtual life, it was a nice little pocket dimension—untouched by an all-consuming internship I was doing at a major newspaper—where I could disengage for a few hours and learn how to feel sure of myself as a gay man. I feel it’s no coincidence that in the past few months I found myself steadily dating someone for the first time in my life.

However, as my own previous experience with online communities has taught me, such places tend to stagnate, with the same people talking the same things over and over, and run their course when members go elsewhere, real or digital. While the platform has attracted over 50 million people since the pandemic started, I’ve noticed lately that as vaccination programs across industrialized countries steadily allow people to begin to resume their lives (though new mutations of the virus—partially fueled by people engaging in irresponsible behavior while trying to make up for lost time—threaten to undo the progress), the Discord servers where I used to hang out seem to have emptied.

The other night I logged into a community that I haven’t visited in several weeks and someone joked that people seem to only come back when they are having issues with their partners. A few regulars have stayed, not unlike the patrons at a bar. I wish I could say it was emotional, but the truth is that moving on tends to be so smooth that you simply don’t notice. One day will be the last time you visit a small corner of the internet that was the world to you, and you won’t remember it because your attention is somewhere else now.

But there are always tragic reminders of why such places exist in the first place, and that platforms to connect and communicate with other queer people—Discord, Tumblr, or other—will probably continue to exist in some form or another.

Early in July, I went to Galicia, in northeast Spain, on holiday with the guy I was dating at the time. But our good time together in Santiago and A Coruña was eclipsed by the death of Samuel Luiz, a 24-year-old young man of Brazilian origin who was killed by a group of men as they yelled homophobic slurs at him.

Luiz’s death, which was in the spotlight of Spanish society for a few weeks, hit us particularly hard. It’s easy to buy into the myth of Spain and Europe as places where those types of things don’t happen. Then I think of Ángelo and remember that, despite the time and the distance, this was not a world thought for us.

A lot has been said about the disappearance of queer spaces in the past few years, mainly because of gentrification and mainstream society becoming more accepting (or at least tolerant) of LGBTQ+ individuals. But making spaces where we can be our own, talk about our specific issues and let our guard down matters.

Now I stand at a crossroads, again. The internship that brought me to Spain is coming to an end, and the circle of real-life friends I’ve made in the past two years in Madrid is separating, with many returning to their homes and a few coming back to the Americas.

Every now and then I still pop up into Discord servers to have some small talk about how my day was whenever I see a few of the regulars online, but it’s hardly the same anymore. I guess, once more, I will find another community, whether real or digital.

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It could have said something like, “AJ has given up his studies,” because the French wording is similar for all scenarios. That particular formulation is most often used in reference to death, true. But on this quiet Sunday morning, when I was about to go grocery shopping, I found the concept outrageous: AJ was simply too real to me to turn up dead online.

AJ loved the L.A. Zoo, Donald Duck orange juice, and cats. He often held his arms close to his chest, like a T-Rex. He was sarcastic. He could play the guitar, and would sometimes play mine, but he didn’t sing. He was very much alive in my mind.

I texted Fergus, a mutual friend from high school: “AJ is fine, right? He didn’t kill himself or anything.” Fergus texted back: “I don’t think he killed himself. Nico got a Snapchat from him the other day.” The text tone was mocking. I didn’t text AJ for this very reason; I was so sure that he was alive that I thought he, like Fergus, would make fun of me for being worried that he was dead.

So now all was presumably well. We had Facebook, we had Snapchat, we knew what was going on! I responded with “Ok yay, glad AJ is still alive!” and Fergus and I continued to debate whether pancakes or waffles were tastier. Something significant and heart-wrenching had happened, but it quickly disappeared, lost in the way social media collapses all distinction between the trivial and the profound.

The author (left) and AJ. Photo courtesy of Emma Electra Jones.

I met AJ sometime in the fifth grade. At first we weren’t friends. In fact, I hated him for a good portion of the sixth and seventh grades in that irrational way that children sometimes hate one another. Eventually I no longer found him an awful person to be around, and we were good friends throughout high school. When we went off to college we carried on our friendship online—the way my friends and I do almost everything. But an unforeseen hazard of living life online is that it confers a kind of immortality that doesn’t square with real life—and certainly not real death.

Around 11 p.m. that same Sunday, I was cooking chicken-less chicken nuggets for a group of friends in my New York apartment when I went to my bedroom to grab my phone. There was a text: “Emma, AJ did kill himself. I’m sorry if you wake up to this.” Fergus had just gotten off the phone with AJ’s mother. Later, I would find out that he had died two days earlier after overdosing on heroin. I would learn that he was an addict and had overdosed once before. I would remember that he’d dabbled with drugs while we were in high school. But the moment that I read those words, the only thought that came to mind was being 16, out past curfew, parked somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, and as I collapsed in the hallway of my apartment, weeping, I kept repeating: “Oh my god, I kissed him in the back of a truck and now he’s dead.”

I had some previous experience with death: the passing of a great uncle. The sensations that I was having now, though, were new and horrible. This death made me frantic. Finding out that a close friend has died without any human contact, not even the sound of another person’s voice, is disorienting. For me there was no ritual to delineate when he had died and when he had lived—no sheet pulled over the face, no pennies on the eyelids, no pronouncement and silence.

That night everyone who knew him was bewildered. We exchanged shocked online messages. Was this real? Could these texts be trusted? Because that’s all anyone was getting: texts. The mother of a friend of mine was waiting to tell her children until she had “more evidence.”

But in the end, it didn’t matter, because there wasn’t any. There were only those same words sent over and over again from person to person: “AJ is dead.”

My relationship with AJ was always somewhere between friendly and flirtatious, and it reached an apex the summer before we became seniors in high school when we watched a lot of movies, kissed in a truck; I even had dinner with his parents. Maybe for a second we almost were, and then we weren’t. But that was okay; our relationship had always been fluid and easy. I trusted AJ. Even though I knew he liked drugs, and would often do them at parties, I never worried that he’d take things too far. He once told me that he would never do heroin “because I know I’d like it too much.”

But of course that wasn’t what happened. Fifty thousand Americans died from drug overdoses in 2016, and AJ was one of them. As soon as Fergus texted me the news I wanted to call him to find out how AJ had gotten involved with opioids. I wanted to know whether everybody else was aware of his drug problem and I was just in the dark. I wanted to understand how in the world this could have happened.

But Fergus lived in Canada and didn’t have a phone plan. It would cost him a fortune to talk on the telephone. I realize how irrational that sounds—Your friend died and you were concerned with phone plans? Or: What about Skype? Maybe it was also easier not to call. Maybe I appreciated the distance that technology gave us. I knew that a call would reflect my own shock and sadness back at me, and I didn’t want to stare at someone through a screen who I knew felt as hollow as I did.

And calling would also have made it real, as though I’d killed him. He wasn’t really dead yet. Not if I let the internet stand between me and his death.

After he died, I was alone in Manhattan, texting people and reading Facebook messages filled with condolences. I found out about the date of his funeral in a Facebook post from his mom. So while all of this public grief was unfolding online, each of us was experiencing it alone, tucked away in our separate corners of the world.

Later I got a message that AJ had “liked” one of my photos, but in fact his mother had taken over his Facebook page and it was no longer him, though it seemed to be. I still get the occasional notification that AJ has posted something on his wall or that he is online. This always feels existentially wrong, a dead person spending time making Facebook posts.

The first time I felt genuinely better after his death was when I flew home to L.A. for the funeral. I spent the whole weekend in a cluster of friends, and was alone for no more than two hours the entire time. We really “shared” memories and stories. We held one another. We cried. We also went go-cart racing and ate garlic fries. We existed together in a way that was impossible over social media. We couldn’t plan what to say or how to express ourselves, as you can in online forums, and I think we suffered less because of it. We got to experience the honesty and relief of laying our grief bare to one another.

And, perhaps most importantly, we could all see, plainly, that AJ was not there.

The post When You Live Online, Will Anyone Know When You Die? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A:
Test me all night, baby.

No, really. Sign me up to be the subject of A/B testing. I’d even be willing to sign a blanket consent form, right now, so that all of Silicon Valley’s biggest brains can test me for the purpose of improving the human future.

Everybody’s doing it. In fact, you’ve likely been A/B tested without your knowledge if you’ve ever used Google or Facebook.

With A/B testing, different users are given different variants of a website or an email or a purchasing button to test what small changes online make you more likely to click, or read, or buy, or spend more time in a particular online environment. (A/B typically suggests two variables but, in reality, we are in a multi-variable world.) If you’re reading this column online, you could be being A/B tested right now—it could be running in three different formats, with your reaction to each variable (different headlines, different layouts, maybe even different handsome photos of your columnist) being measured, recorded, and statistically analyzed.

The gold standard for California’s technology industry, A/B tests are also called bucket testing and split-run testing, and they neither can be detected or escaped. A/B tests are how we improve our designs, our interfaces, and even ourselves.

Conducted carefully and repeatedly, they allow for refinements to fit the needs of users and remove guess-work for those running sites and delivering more products.

This notion of tests is old—it’s often attributed to 1908 tests that were used to improve industrial processes at a Guinness brewery in Ireland. But Google has optimized its globe-dominating search business for such testing. Facebook is similarly devoted to A/B testing to continuously refine its site. On the other side is Snap, whose CEO Evan Spiegel doesn’t like to do such testing, preferring a more visceral approach. Is that why Snap is facing such challenges in keeping users?

A/B testing can feel more like a religion or a cult than a scientific procedure. It requires building unseen rituals into everything you put up online. But the disciplines of experimenting and testing help avoid the human preference for the status quo.

We should demand even more from A/B testing. The human race must redesign and improve all sorts of systems—energy, traffic, food and water supply, communications, and even governing systems —if we’re going to avoid self-inflicted disasters, from climate change to famines to wars. So why don’t we commit ourselves to a culture of continuous optimization in the real world, not just the virtual?

B:
I am not your test subject, baby.

And I have no desire to be Silicon Valley’s guinea pig. Oh, yes, I know the internet is full of fine print that lets me know that I’m being tested. But that doesn’t mean I’m being meaningfully asked for my consent. And I’m not really being compensated for all the data that’s being collected from experiments conducted on me.

My online time is now given over to companies experimenting upon me for the purpose of getting me to choose to see which variables will change my own behavior. In essence, I’m a dystopian lab rat forced to design the maze—and the reward—that will entrap me. Great.

And even the real world no longer provides an escape because the Internet of Things–with its web-connected air conditioning and appliances—tests me even when I’m relaxing in my own home, making a cup of coffee.

Facebook will tell you that all its services, provided to me free, are a form of compensation, but studies also tell me that spending more time on Facebook—which is the goal of many of their experiments—makes me less happy. Sadness is not a method of payment I accept.

Such testing has created an unacknowledged ethical crisis—and real public health concerns. The more we click, the more we’re being tested. And if experiments show the way to make us spend more time than is healthy for us in an online environment, or to spend more money than is good for our family’s finances, aren’t we being harmed by our own testimony? (Am I talking about my own behavior here, you ask? Can I plead the Fifth?)

In other fields, like medicine, society developed standards and review boards for governing the testing of human subjects. But these standards aren’t being applied to all the A/B testing to which we’re constantly subjected online.

There are questions here for our faltering democracy, too. California has hundreds of companies that will help an interest group or a politician test to determine the best ways to manipulate our emotions and online behavior for their purposes. Is such human testing a factor in the rise of polarization and fake information that is weakening our bonds to our fellow citizens?

If so, this world of testing needs real regulation—by the same authorities, and under the same laws, that allow for regulation of business practices in the name of protecting people from health and financial threats. One way to start might be to add regulation of A/B testing and other online experiments to the privacy regulations that some jurisdictions impose on tech companies.

And there are other, more prosaic problems. All these A/B tests can be wasteful, producing data that can become quickly outdated. That data creates its own gravity and a bias in favor of the status quo. That’s dangerous because the past doesn’t always predict the future, especially online.

A/B testing and multivariable varieties of it are also impersonal. Such testing doesn’t capture who the users are, and the needs of people can be as diverse and different as individuals themselves.

Of course, smart people in Silicon Valley know this, which is why they are moving beyond A/B testing to the realm of machine learning: a world of algorithms that learn about each individual user. The promise, as yet unrealized, is that the algorithms will continuously improve in giving each user customized products and answers.

Such machine learning blurs the line between human, interface, and machine. In testing their way into this future, California’s brightest brains are simultaneously hiding behind their screens and intruding into their fellow citizens’ lives and minds in a way that they would never dare in person.

Yes, their goal may improve the human experience in many fields. But constant testing and ever greater refinement can be deeply disrespectful to humans, our privacy, and our rights. Yes, we have the right to choose, A or B. But how much choice does continuous testing really leave us test subjects about the nature of our collective future?

The post Is A/B Product Testing Turning Us into Silicon Valley’s Lab Rats? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Which is the world you want to live in? One where low-skilled, disillusioned factory workers call for protectionist barriers? Or one where entrepreneurs—using their ingenuity, state of the art technology, and the open market access that American trade negotiators have secured over the past eight decades—sell to customers across the planet, and grow their businesses, hire new people, and realize their full potential?

If you choose the latter world, that’s great. But we will need a new roadmap to navigate it.

The image of globalization, imprinted on many minds, is of American factories fleeing to Mexico or China. But here’s what globalization really is: the voluntary, mutually consenting exchange of goods and services between a buyer in one country and a seller in another country.

More important, here is what globalization is becoming: cross-border sales of goods and services among small businesses—like Travis’s motorbike gear venture—that are selling online, and foreign buyers who are finding them there. Why would we want to shut down such globalization?

E-commerce is breaking what seemed to be an “iron law” of international economics: that exporting was possible only for large companies. Today, while fewer than 5 percent of U.S. companies export, 97 percent of U.S. eBay sellers do. In a new survey of more than 3,000 developing country companies, my firm Nextrade Group finds that half of small online sellers export (while only 20 percent of small offline sellers do), and that more than 60 percent of online sellers export to two or more markets (as opposed to offline sellers, who tend to export to only one market).

Workers manufacture car dash mats at a maquiladora belonging to the TECMA group in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Dec. 27, 2013. Photo by Ivan Pierre Aguirre/Associated Press.

Companies today are born global because they are born digital. Which makes this a historic time. We are at the verge of creating a global equivalent of a medieval town square where small sellers and buyers come together to transact. It is a market where anyone can sell to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

While e-commerce enables developing countries to leapfrog to the 21st century’s technology-powered world economy, countries like the United States are particularly well-placed to benefit. We already have the connectivity, logistics, online services from payments to finance to cutting-edge online services, intellectual property, and people with wide-spread digital skills, which developing economies lack.

But we are not optimizing this opportunity. If we were, we would be celebrating free trade and open markets as enablers of our small businesses and online entrepreneurs, not bashing them as enemies of our factory workers whose time has passed. McKinsey Global Institute—which uses dozens of indicators to create an index of digital assets, usages, and workers—finds that the United States is using only 18 percent of its full digital potential; Europe is at just 12 percent. In a survey I recently conducted, U.S. middle market companies graded themselves C- on digital readiness. And more than 50 percent of developing country small businesses rate as poor or very poor in a number of areas in their economies needed for e-commerce to work, such as digital regulations, e-commerce logistics, access to online finance, and their own capacity for cross-border e-commerce.

Policymakers who aspire to empower small businesses to thrive in the global online marketplace need to think outside the box. To name five ways how:

• Microloans for micro businesses. Export credit agencies have traditionally provided trade credit insurance and guaranteed exporters’ working capital loans issued by banks. E-commerce presents a new challenge: Micro and small online sellers often need much smaller and faster working capital loans than banks are able to issue. At the same time, FinTech and online lending companies are on a tear, literally making up for lack of bank lending for small business. Online lenders offer a huge opportunity for export credit agencies like Export-Import Bank to guarantee diversified portfolios of microloans for export-driven online sellers, thus lowering their cost of capital.

• Export promotion for online sellers. Getting online is one thing; successfully exporting online is another matter. Cross-border e-commerce requires keen know-how about export promotion that smaller countries and even government agencies (like the export-promoting Commerce Department) don’t have—such as how to create an international multi-channel shopper strategy or build savvy online advertisement strategies for different markets.

So who knows how to promote e-commerce exports? Global e-commerce platforms do, and they have a keen interest in cultivating new e-commerce users. One innovative model for e-commerce capacity-building is a social impact bond, whereby private foundations, social impact investors, and commerce platforms make the initial investment in promoting exports and get compensated at a premium by the government and development agencies if the project meets certain pre-established metrics that governments value, such as the number of e-commerce-related jobs created, or the amount of new exports. Social impact bonds have been used to cure malaria and save rhinos. So why not to promote e-commerce?

• Customs procedures for small business. Customs regimes in many countries are still tailored to the needs of traditional traders and large companies, rather than to small businesses with limited compliance capabilities. Study after study show that complex customs requirements are a top concern for small exporters and importers in the U.S. and worldwide. The silver bullet for getting rid of these barriers and fueling small business trade is raising de minimis levels—the value of shipment below which goods enter duty- and tax-free. High de minimis creates free trade for small business. In a major service to small foreign businesses selling to U.S. consumers, and to U.S. consumers and companies buying from abroad, the United States raised its de minimis to a very respectable $800 per shipment in 2016. However, de minimis is in many countries laughably low, such as $15 in Canada and $150 in the European Union).

One solution is to launch negotiations on de minimis among a “coalition of the willing.” In such an agreement, each member government might commit to ratcheting up the de minimis level over a period of five to seven years to, say, $1,000, in exchange for a similar commitment from the other members. In other words, each member government would give a little market access at the lower rungs of trade in order to gain a lot more market access in return, just as in a tariff reduction schedule in a trade agreement.

• Digital regulations. My new survey shows that even small online merchants often struggle with digital regulations when seeking to export. For example, in the United States, small financial services companies report suffering from stringent consumer data privacy and protection rules in foreign markets, and from uncertain legal liability for internet intermediaries for user content on their sites. In a survey of Latin American companies, I found that one-third of online sellers viewed uncertain legal liability rules as “very significant” obstacles, while one-quarter were negatively impacted by foreign data localization and data privacy rules.

This is an area where the United States has gold standard rules, and needs to drive trading partners to adopt measures that are interoperable with ours. The Trans-Pacific Partnership was just that vehicle, and its killer, the Trump Administration, has to come up with a new and better one. A pilot could be run with the United Kingdom, whose officials have stressed digital trade as a path to competitiveness.

• Trade adjustment. The giant question mark in tomorrow’s economy is adaptability of labor—whether workers like Nicole and Jennifer could be retrained to take advantage of the seemingly limitless possibilities opened by the global online marketplace.

The answer to this question is not at all clear. Existing tools—such as the Trade Adjustment Assistance that helped retrain more than 230,000 workers impacted by trade over the past decade—will not be enough. The policy question should rather be how to equip tomorrow’s workers to thrive in the global digital economy, one where the pace of change is very fast and competition is ubiquitous. One place to look is at Singapore’s model of active retraining of workers. Another solution: create public-private partnerships between the government and the resented “tech elite” companies such as Facebook to deploy corporate PR and social responsibility dollars to fuel the retooling and rehiring of digital-era workers, in exchange for lower payroll taxes.

Globalization as we’ve known it is coming to a close. It’s time to stop chasing its ghosts—and to start crafting creative policies to empower workers and businesses so that they can leverage the 21st century tools for growth: e-commerce and open markets.

The post How the Internet and E-Commerce Are Hacking Protectionism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.