The Silicon Oligarchy
themargins.substack.com
themargins.substack.com
At least be honest and say that you want Zuckerberg to censor and police trump. That’s the truth. But don’t pretend that somehow it’s immoral to allow the US President to post on your platform. He’s the president, whether you like it or not.
A lot of former British colonies have the same principle, dating from 1688/1689: https://www.parliament.nz/en/visit-and-learn/how-parliament-...
Exactly what's at stake here. Keeping the government independent from outside control by those who happen to control the means of communication.
One view is authoritarian, a person with lots of power who can do whatever he wants.
The other view is democratic, a person employed by citizens to be a representative and have some managerial role.
In the second view, he should have (unless it's required by his job) exactly the same permissions as any other citizen.
The phone company was.[1] TV networks were.[2] And while there is still some debate about this, net neutrality would apply that obligation to ISPs. Why not Facebook and Twitter?
Radio and TV use public resources (EM waves), to which they have been granted a government license, to transmit information, so the government can ask them to do certain things at times.
These were regulated monopolies.
Then things get broadened because yes, that is copyrighted stuff being shared, guess we should stop that. Yes, if that revenge porn isn't illegal it will be soon, guess we should block that. Yes, if they literally chose a nazi flag as their logo we can agree they're a hate group. Yes, that user's post about the smooth taste of Lucky Strike cigarettes does look like it was upvoted by a botnet. Yes, we could probably detect those rape threat messages you received and block them, senator.
And before you know it, you're adjudicating whether that person was joking when he said he'd blow up the airport for cancelling his flight; whether that 'parody news' website claiming vaccines cause autism is clearly enough a parody; and whether the letter Q is a hate symbol.
The main different between acting as a public figure VS a private citizen is that you represent (and influence) other people.
As it should be. The military reports to our civilian leadership. The latter constrains the former. That, almost by definition, leaves the latter less constrained than the former.
>The other view is democratic, a person employed by citizens to be a representative and have some managerial role.
but there are also views about what responsibilities are in relation to these kinds of figures.
One could easily conceive of the responsibility would be to not let the authoritarian (a dictator) broadcast because their authority is illegitimate. So not let them broadcast at all on your service, whether they hold to the rules or not.
But let the democratically chosen leader broadcast, whether they hold to the service terms or not, because of needs to serve user base of democratically chosen leader's constituency.
That said I personally believe in shutting him down, but I can conceive of lots of different viewpoints which might find him reprehensible but still consider that it is needed to let him have access, although probably the real viewpoint is "show me the money!"
Zuckerberg is not the kid in the social network movie who's "not an asshole, you're just trying really hard to be one." No one has ever said a single good thing about him, or his partner Sandberg, in a long time. By all measures they seem to be selfish people who have nothing else in their minds other than keeping and growing the power they have now. The only other thing they are now famous for is how they manipulate good founders of great products with false promises and then kick them out to consolidate even more power. At least that's all you can tell from what little we know of these billionaire oligarchs lives.
In the end, I'm going to hypothesize that America became a great country because for a while some of its leaders and rich people at least tried to do _some_ good things to its people and try to be the better person now and then. Given the degree to which every single rich person and politician in power seems self-obsessed if not overtly corrupt, it doesn't bode too well for the life of the common man in America or anywhere else for the matter.
I'm not particularly worried about WW3 though, because I don't see any good country left behind to fight every totalitarian nation that's getting created now.
I thought the consensus was that the looters were mostly young out-of-states whites? And to insinuate that the President had read some 1940s Florida mayor's (sorry, I can't remember who the saying is originally attributed to) speeches and knew the connotations of that phrase is ridiculous.
This is easy and standard procedure for talks, ... of big company leaders, politicians, ...
Donald Trump was already an adult in 1967 and even if he didn't know this was a dog-whistle for white supremacists.... Facebook doesn't have to amplify destructive ideologies just because the ones who relay it are ignorant. Otherwise everyone would invoke that excuse.
The idea that this is a well-known racist catchphrase which anybody had heard of a month ago is absurd, and you know it.
(For the record, I despise Trump. All I ask is that we keep our criticism of him tethered to reality - it's not like we don't have enough non-fictional reasons to oppose him.)
When people loot, other people will shoot them to prevent their livelihood from being destroyed. It’s a good phrase to sum up that there is going to be a violent reaction to looting.
Fix that problem then. Censorship on huge public platforms should not be allowed.
Goatse for everyone!
Seeing how violent these riots can get, that phrase is exactly what I would love to hear from authorities as black business owner, for example.
I can understand how a non-American might miss Trump's racist phrases, but he's pandering to a white supremacist base who are sure to see them.
I don't have a specific link to reference, but the tactic he's using is often referred to as a "dog whistle".
I don’t understand how people think there’s a white supremacist base that has a ton of power in this country.
> I don’t understand how people think there’s a white supremacist base that has a ton of power in this country.
The police can shoot people dead, lie about the circumstances, and not even face trial or suspension? Have you missed all the protests and the wall to wall news coverage of the past few weeks?
(How well people in the streets translates into political representation, we'll discover at the end of this year. For a while after 2016 there was a cottage industry of german TV reporters going to the US to interview Trump voters, and finding they often had strong views on minorities despite not having known any themselves. That may or may not be true in general, but it's the picture we got here.)
However, it does seem that even though the soviets haven't been with us for several decades, the subject of their favourite whataboutism fallacy didn't end when the cold war did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
"Police brutality" was common enough to be portrayed in 2004 childrens' pop culture (note the knee on the neck) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg3NFHv7ASo
Where is the ubiquitous racism being seen? I am in no way trying to be facetious, but we need to be accurate here. Only reason I ask is because I see racism being thrown around at people who aren't racist, and only because they disagree with a narrative. That word doesn't really mean anything anymore.
I haven't missed it, I just don't think police brutality is purely a race issue. I think it comes down to poor training and not enough vetting so psychopaths like Chauvin don't get the job. There's also not enough accountability for those in charge to fire these cops after multiple civilian complaints are filed against them.
(my current theory as to why the US military is more enlightened than US police is (a) they normally operate in situations where they have to win hearts and minds, and (b) "up or out" gets rid of bad apples)
For what it's worth, I have colleagues who have gone through police academy. It's 2 years here, which may correlate with the <1 per 10mm rate on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
To quote: "My guess is that the number of organized white supremacists in the country is in the very low five digits." It's just the thoughts of some random blogger, not an academic study, but he lays out his methodology in detail and it seems reasonable.
Of course that was four years ago, but the estimate seems consistent with the evidence from the 2017 Charlottesville rally, which only drew a few hundred attendees despite being the biggest, most prominent and well-publicised white supremacist rally in the USA for decades.
Of course this is only talking about active, open white supremacists, not the full gamut of racism. But I find it hard to believe that the number of Richard-Spencer-style racists in the USA is anything other than tiny - far too small to have any influence at the ballot box. And by the way, does anyone seriously think that there was ever any chance of these people voting for Hillary Clinton (or Joe Biden) in the first place?
To quote the same blog post:
> Dog whistling seems to be the theory that if you want to know what someone really believes, you have to throw away decades of consistent statements supporting the side of an issue that everyone else in the world supports, and instead pay attention only to one weird out-of-character non-statement which implies he supports a totally taboo position which is perhaps literally the most unpopular thing it is possible to think.
> And then you have to imagine some of the most brilliant rhetoricians and persuaders in the world are calculating that it’s worth risking exposure this taboo belief in order to win support from a tiny group with five-digit membership whose support nobody wants, by sending a secret message, which inevitably every single media outlet in the world instantly picks up on and makes the focus of all their coverage for the rest of the election.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-w...
Since there are so many possible deconstructions (as many as there are readers), it also means that it's a game that the speaker cannot win. Someone will always be able to deconstruct what you say to be a dogwhistle, no matter what you say. So the only possible approach is to just ignore them, because if you try to play their game, you are going to lose, and to continue to lose.
At this point, it seems like a non-falsifiable hypothesis. I constantly see how in american politics anything Trump says gets interpreted in most bizzare way possible, rationalizing it that he's speaking in secret code for his white supremacist friends. What really got me whas the point where american media quoted Trump on praising General Lee, as if Trump was gloryfing Conferedacy - while the quote in context was clearly intended to paint Lee as a worthy adversary and by that, praise the Union.
I'm sorry, but after that, all accusations of "racism" and "white supremacy" sound like the boy who just cries wolf again. And the most saddeing part about it is, I know for a fact that after saying that, I will be accused of being a closeted nazi too.
This might sound ridiculous but it's taken very seriously by a growing number of people; it has its roots in a certain strain of postmodern thought called critical race theory that's been slowly emanating out of academia for the last decade or two and is now seriously spilling over into the mainstream. See e.g. Robin Diangelo's book White Fragility (which is currently back on the bestseller lists) which asserts that all white people are racist, and if you're white and don't admit that you're racist then this is just you demonstrating "white fragility" which proves... that you're a racist. This is of course divisive, harmful, unfalsifiable garbage but if you don't think these kind of ideas are becoming very influential then you haven't been paying attention.
So basically the reason why it seems like people are constantly throwing around terms like "racist" and "white supremacy" like they have no meaning is because they have consciously and deliberately stripped these words of all meaning. Of course that's not how they'd describe it, but if think this is just me being a conspiratorial right-wing nutjob I highly encourage you to learn more about critical race theory (newdiscourses.com is a good place to start) and understand what these activists are saying. This stuff is coming for you eventually whether you like it or not so you'd better be prepared.
Don't we all have some implicit biases? I know I do. I have had (and probably, unfortunately still have) biases about women and non-binary people, biases about people from other ethnicities and countries, and although I try to work them out, it's not something that can be done completely.
However, I can't find a rational reason to name these biases "racism" or "white supremacy", words that for any sane person mean not some subconcious thought process, but a fully concious evil. Using these terms in such a way is a very dishonest moat and castle tactic.
I have to come clean: I haven't been completely intellectually honest in asking the question above. I have already known about it.
The point is, I have a problem with the way present-day american political life has a way with meanings of words. You guys seem to put so much importance on imaginary dog-whistels and connotations, and are willing to interpret the original phrases in such bizzare and far-fetched ways.
And if we continue to play this game, the only ones who win are the people that are willingly interpret anything in the most offensive and divisive way.
As you all point out, this could simply be highly unfortunate coincidence. I would advise the white house to try internally circulating campaigns for feedback before running them.
(a flight of fancy: the infamous Antifa agent Max Isayev, as part of a highly structured plot —supported not only by the FBI, but also by Thurn und Taxis and the Trans Scouts of America— to prevent Trump's reelection, has gone deep undercover at Fox under the name of Seymour Buttz, and has been both circulating memes with unfortunate connotations among the Base and flashing subliminal emoji during programming, confident that in the US things that happened in WW2 are even less part of common knowledge than things that Ancient Astronaut theorists believe, making it more likely his nefarious "suggestions" will intermittently seep into campaign material with the innocents none the wiser.)
If you want your fellow neighbors gunned down, you should move to China! You'd absolutely love it there! You'd love to know their government murders their dissenters. I think you'd have a little trouble being a black business owner, but the pros outweigh the cons.
But that phrase wasn't referring to fellow neighbors. It was referring to looters.
I would absoltely want people who were threatening me with robbery and violence to be threatened with violence back, yes. That's the function of police in any modern society.
The US military doctrine differs with you on how armed authorities should approach crowd control: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347585 (an older manual, but the doctrine seems to be up to date: they have shown themselves unwilling to play cossacks for their czar, both in word and in deed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23412986
https://www.military.com/benefits/military-legal/can-militar... )
By the way, speaking of shooting, what did you think of "Брат 2"?
as well as cause for optimism: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/18/politics/peggy-wallace-ke... (about George "segregation forever" Wallace's daughter and grandson)
I know americans who truly believe it is a colour-blind country where everyone is middle-class. I hope they can make it so.
It has a Stalin association, yes - but in russian culture, this phrase would first and foremost judged in context and with intended meaning. I would never call someone a stalinist just because of the fact that he used that saying, it would be insane on my (or anyone's) part.
> The US military doctrine differs with you on how armed authorities should approach crowd control
That's a good point. Come to think of it, yes, it makes sense to me that shooting to kill all the possible looters (because you can't know for sure what's going on in a rioting crowd) is not the best approach to the problem. However, the phrase "when the looting starts, the shoorting starts" doesn't neccessarilly mean "kill all the looters".
And regardless, discussion of different ways the law enforcement should react to military seems like a good thing, and if you allow such discussions, you should allow bad ideas too.
> By the way, speaking of shooting, what did you think of "Брат 2"?
I consider this movie to be a work of genius, but I also am completelly apalled that there's a lot of my fellow citizens who seriously consider the main hero an inspiration. He's a completely broken man with clear signs of PTSD and sociopathy, a classic anti-hero, and you can absolutely admire the movie without admiring him.
I agree that bad ideas should be allowed in discussions[1]. If we're still talking about the same poor idea, it's probably a good idea if one quashes the ideas (whether poor or good) that run afoul of a platform's violence[2] policy https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/glorification... "You may not threaten violence against an individual or a group of people" (maybe reword your poor ideas to avoid saying "the shooting starts" in a country that distinguishes between assault and battery?) before publishing on that platform. I believe Theodore Roosevelt found his office a bully pulpit (note: not a bully pulpit) despite his lack of FB and TWTR.
Thanks also for the clarification of russian culture[3]. That sounds more advanced than anglophone (I am guessing the UK is not significantly more advanced than the US on this front, as Orwell makes it abundantly clear in both his fiction and nonfiction that he is a product of the english middle class), but I have no good suggestions for anglophones beyond education, which takes time. (not to mention that in the world of unvaccinated coronavirus, a two-student schooldesk is unlikely to be introduced in the US), time which is probably beyond the US Buxton Index[4].
[1] an advantage earlier US politicians had is that journalists would routinely rewrite even their on-the-record spoken comments to be more palatable in print. ("more" is an important qualifier here; Earl Butz resigned despite the fact that his jokes had been edited for taste when being reported)
[2] one amusing thing comparing US and USSR 70's and 80's movies is the completely different censorship. On one side you get very little blood, on the other very few breasts. (as for beasts, they're either scary or befriended. both systems agreed pirates are always villains) I was surprised by the ending to White Sun of the Desert because it was the first I'd seen a soviet shoot-out.
[3] I've learned some russian from Lavrov's poetry. Does anyone have suggestions for which pieces of Pompeo I might improve my english with?
[4] I learned of the Buxton Index from Dijkstra. Something else that stuck with me is that he said, as a young dutchman, he was educated to never start speaking a sentence before one knows how one is going to finish it. Maybe the equivalent for twitter should be "don't start typing before you've thought through the 140th character?" More cynically, the old IBM slogan ought to be revived: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/how-f...
He said "When the looting starts, the shooting starts". This is obviously not a serious, literal statement and it doesn't even say who would be doing the shooting - Merely that the situation could escalate into shooting. Also, I don't see any trace of racism in that sentence.
If this statement leads to a reduction of actual on-the-ground violence, then this is a net positive and is why freedom of speech is important.
Talking about violence is much better than actually carrying out violence. Trump is likely one of the least violent presidents when you actually count the injured and the dead. Yet he has repeatedly made all sorts of verbal threats in the past... None of which he actually implemented.
It's also the case in this particular example the he is only the president of the US, not the president of the world. If a service has community rules that are world-wide in scope, then I would expect that at least outside the US, the rules are equally applied to all content published there.
He could be allowed to use it on the same term as anyone else. I don't know, but maybe to people in Europe it is especially disturbing to people in that he's been given almost free reign. In some ways, an omen of the darkest possible future.
The undeniable subtext of on one hand getting content removed for posting legitimate journalistic photos, and on the other hand allowing Trump to post hate speach that would be straight up illegal in several EU countries is truly disturbing.
Europe was where fascism got its face, we fear it for a reason, and Trump unfortunately helps actual fascist advance their influence here. He idolizes the instigator of the war, a war that across almost all of Europe countries had to sacrifice a sizeable fraction of their population to try to stop, and without US we might not have.
So, yes. When someone clearly has an agenda to cause suffering, conflict; and who revels in the the suffering of others, to give them a platform is immoral. There are no two ways about it.
I and many in this part of the world would very much prefer if anyone who in any way supports or embolden fascists did not have any venue at all to make their voice heard, moreso when they command what is undoubtedly the greatest single military power on the planet.
What Trump says would still be in the news of course, and we would be aware, but his outburst would no longer be algorithmically targeted at those who who have shown to engage with it.
Some speech might actually not be worth risking another 70 million lives or more on, president of the US or not. It's not at all the only problem that needs solving, but it's one that can be solved.
Does it extend to foreign leaders? Is Facebook obliged to publish everything Xi says as well?
How far down the government does it extend? Cabinet members? Senators? Judges? Military?
Does it extend to other content that would be banned? Is Facebook morally or legally obliged to publish porn if it's from the Presidential account? Other objectionable images, violence, gore, goatse?
Does it extend to content that's false and harmful to Facebook itself? If Trump posts a fake FB stock price graph with "look at these LOOSERS", is FB legally or morally obliged to host that regardless of how many billions in shareholder value it costs them? Is CNN obliged to show Trump's fake CNN chyron? Is Twitter?
How circumlocutious does a death threat have to be for FB to still be legally or morally obliged to host it? What about "Someone should take care of this Zuckerberg guy" over a picture of a bullet?
Understandably tech is arguably in infancy but nothing like the decades before today. So the tech monopolies of today weren't a thing before but people had so much opportunity in the earliest years; that resulted in money being easy to be made with little concern of whatever outcome. Nowadays platforms control most of the market and people are now starting to notice an oligarchy in tech. Resulting in concern propagating in recent years.
It's well known a lot of people in society don't have a voice and when they're wronged by the system(s) of society; whether it be authoritarian or not. I'm unsure if we can really prove current day is worse or better than previously in history regarding to having a voice/impact when being wronged. My question is how do we justly blame a worse outcome on a tech oligarchy and when we cannot know the foregoing being worse or better than the past?
For your amusement, WASP self-parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0 "haters like to ???? ?? our ivy league education / but they're just jealous 'cause our families run the nation"
(as far as I can tell, this commerical was only aired in New England. That's OK, the P-word is their word, they can use it. "Sloane Ranger" for our brit friends, I suppose. It's "Goldküstenmilieu" here. What is the term in your countries?)
I thought this was going to be about Intel/TSMC/Samsung/GlobalFoundries. There's barely any Silicon in the valley anymore.
That's pretty bizarre even by Zuck's standards
Untracked URL https://themargins.substack.com/p/the-silicon-oligarchy
2014 CFR discussion[1]: "… What about Twitter? I have no idea what Twitter is good for. But if it flips out every tyrant in the Middle East, I'm interested." - Michael Rogers, Founder, Practical Futurist; Futurist-in-Residence, New York Times Company
In some cases in these US protests/revolts the authorities stepped completely back allowing looters and vandals complete reign over some areas. That's the complete opposite of what happened in Turkey.
I've seen this kind of "good cop bad cop" charade a lot recently. Not just in the news but also in real life at my last company. You have one person acting like the bad guy using extreme arguments and another person acting like the good guy using less extreme arguments (though also undesirable) - this encourages people to side with the less extreme position instead of recognizing that they are both undesirable options.
IMO the 'employee walkout' by FB was just a charade in this good cop bad cop game. In a highly divided society, this is the most effective way to persuade people to do what you want. It creates a slow but predictable decline. Within a decade, people will think of the once extreme position as being totally reasonable.
Then they will keep playing the game; it's going to get a point that the good cop will be offering people to take huge salary cuts while the bad cop will be offering to abolish salaries altogether and provide food vouchers instead. There will be some overhanging narrative that we have limited resources and each one of us should do our bit to conserve those resources.
How am I doing so far?
> According to McKenzie Wark when information becomes a commodity it means we will only be able to see the information produced by the vectoral class. This is because they are the ones whose profits depend on the scarcity of information. So when information becomes intellectual property we are bound to repeat the same commodity form, because this is what the market decrees. She states that the “hack” which monetizes information introduces the “vectoralist” class.
> It is the hacker class that produces new information, free from the restrictions of a property form. This however is then used by the vectoral class, who own and control the means of production of information on an industrial scale and mediates connections and access to information (Paolo Pedercini, the founder of the radical games project Molleindustria cites companies like Google, Uber or Airbnb as typical representatives of the vectoral class). The hacker and the vectoral class aren’t always at odds with each other. They can compromise on the free flow of information and the extraction of wealth from this information to fund its development. Think of the open source movement, Reddit and Wikipedia. McKenzie Wark believes that the hacker class should ally themselves with the other producing classes so that they together don’t have to answer to the vectoral class anymore.
But I'm not super convinced vectoralist/hacker is that useful a distinction. I think Orwell called it correctly in predicting Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Where he went too far[1], perhaps because he grew up in a parliamentary system, is in not predicting that the Oceanic outer party would be dualised in two distinct thought-monitoring parties: the pitchfork party and the torch party. https://i.imgur.com/RlmIFzj.jpeg
[1] I haven't read anything but the Goldstein chapters, so all my knowledge of the rest is from pop culture. Is there anything there, or is it "fast-forward?" (Also, it seems pop culture overplays universal oppression: at least 87% of the population appears to be unaffected. Doesn't the severe dystopia only hit those readers who identify with outer party members?)
So boring and unoriginal, missing one side completely and spinning it as unbiased, when it's borderline propaganda. C'mon.
This dovetails quite nicely with my conviction that whatever fortune or misfortune that's allowed to visit American blacks will eventually hit the rest of the country. Widespread housing insecurity? Check. Drug epidemic? Check. Voting rights crisis? See you in November.
One of my wilder observations is that, while the conspiracy theorists are wrong, they're "exactly wrong": the unevidenced thing looks a bit like something that actually happened but with completely different details.
The thing they're worried about is the US doing to white people what it's already done to nonwhite people. Illegal medical experiments? Tuskeegee. "FEMA camps"? The post-Katrina mess. COINTELPRO? Already deployed against civil rights leaders in the 60s and 70s.
We're extremely good pattern matchers, much more than we are aware of, but it stand to reason that as our more complex survival mechanisms seems to have close ties to how we perceive ourselves and maybe our "group", we become really terrible at correctly matching what we intuit, if "we" can be considered the perpetrator.
Hypothesizing that we are part of the victims is also a much more effective strategy for the group if we're in a fear/survival mode, as an erroneous attribution often only presents a post-facto moral dilemma for a few individuals, a dilemma we can shield our ego from by saying we didn't know.
That we didn't know is also often objectively true as long as we disregard the uncanny notion that research on social interaction has let us understand exists, that our brain doesn't always let (most of) us know everything that it is going on if it will harm the social interaction.
Most of the above is not much of a problem when that group is a group of people in the middle of a forest, but becomes very much a problem if it is almost the entire population of a country, and when we as in the current day and time is obsessed with polishing our ego.
What actually happened?
White people weren't immune to widespread addiction after all. (This would have been obvious if Americans had connected alcoholism to illegal drug addiction, or, well, black and white people not actually being biologically different in regards to addiction, but we weren't ready for that.) Our conscious decision not to treat the crack/cocaine epidemic as a public health crisis, because of the racial associations involved therein, meant we were unprepared to deal with the opioid epidemic in an effective manner.
But this also serves as a nice example for what you've observed, because the way that the opioid crisis began to be handled once it finally came out of the shadows was directly informed by how America had seen blacks treated in "Drug War I". The impetus for the swift, soft policies that were put in place were 100% the result of reflection on the destruction drug-related incarceration and public and private divestment of black communities wrought on those caught in the first epidemic.
But I also want to point out that you're coming at the subject from a white perspective: "It happened to black people, so white people are scared it will happen to them." I want to hit you with the black perspective: "It happened to black people, so it is GOING to happen to white people unless you listen to our stories (and here are some examples of what happened when you didn't)." In this light, it's ironic that you would label me the conspiracy theorist. In a lot of these situations, white Americans are paranoid; black Americans are experienced. And it often takes a white person synergizing what we already know into academ-ese for people to take our warnings seriously.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250210715
Again, see you in November.