An Unelected Monarch Is Shaping Our Public Life. His Name Is Mark Zuckerberg
onezero.medium.com
onezero.medium.com
"~Thought exercise~: Let's say you were the mayor of a large city. There are multiple areas in the city where you can shout whatever you want during certain hours. Would you let someone hook up an internet-connected megaphone in each area and pipe in hate speech everywhere simultaneously? And what if we were in a future where there were physical bots indistinguishable from humans that crowded into those public spaces, vociferously indicated their agreement, and cheered him on?
That future is now.
In reality, Facebook owns those public spaces. No one actually goes to that spot in the park anymore. Mark Zuckerberg is the mayor. Oh, and it's not just one city, he's everyone's mayor, everywhere. If you don't use Facebook but you're on Whatsapp, you're still in his jurisdiction. As for the "during certain hours" part? Nope, those internet-connected megaphones are blasting 24/7. Those bots are nodding their heads 24/7. Our mayor also collects megaphone usage fees for himself. He gives you dopamine points, likes, and social validation each time you come back for more. Freedom, yeah."
Facebook doesn't own the public spaces. They own the kiosks. How absurd that people drop their frisbees and basketballs and briefcases and crowd into these stupid kiosks to put on the headphones. Then some get outraged at what is going on in these "public spaces".
That's why I thought the public square analogy was more apt as-is.
I'm pretty sure it's Mark Zuckerberg and the ai cyborg he becomes one day. /s (maybe).
I saw a youtube video where a nazi chick literally said she didn't believe in the Holocaust, but thinks gas chambers for Jews was a pretty good idea. WTF?!
Someone standing at a podium calling for people to willy nilly execute a specific race/ethnic class, should probably be thrown in jail, or we get 1940 all over again.
Here's an expansion of what I said, in my own words. The only people who wielded the "massive megaphone everywhere" before the advent of social media were traditional media organizations (and organizations with disproportionate access to traditional media). These media organizations were relatively professional, with relatively high standards for reporting. They undoubtedly had biases which led to problematic filtering and distortion of the information that they presented. However, with the democratization of media comes to new problems. We no longer have a professional class synthesizing and filtering the information that we see.
Any one of us can wield the massive megaphone now, but there is a huge heterogeneity in that usage. The most passionate partisans, the most nefarious nation states, the Dunningest of Dunning-Krugers,...will use the megaphone the most. Since most people are at least somewhat impressionable, this presents a problem. Whereas before the media would impress upon people with (somewhat problematically) filtered information, now social media is impressing upon people with radically unfiltered garbage misinformation.
We have to admit that this is an existential problem for our democracy. Only then can we begin to solve it. I am not asking for mass-censorship. I am asking for the system of social media to be redesigned in such a way to mitigate the above problems.
The more you connect people and enable one-to-many communication and information distribution, the more you increase the chance of "viral" ideas propagating, be they (in one's view) good or bad ones. The harm imposed by Facebook mostly has to do with the fact that they're a for-profit company, and particularly a for-profit company that doesn't charge users, causing them to acquire revenue in ways that are extremely prone to perverse incentives.
More people gaining the capability to be exposed to more information from more people isn't the problem. I mean, sure, it causes problems and isn't what we're evolved to properly handle, but it's not inherently a bad thing or something that necessitates megamayors policing the distribution streams. (Barring some exceptions in extreme scenarios where death has a high chance of being imminent.)
At some point we'll probably have at least one popular decentralized P2P communication medium / social media platform, backed by cryptography, and there'll be no central authority able to control communication in any way, besides governments arresting people or taking other security measures. Zuckerberg-like figures will be irrelevant in these systems, but they'll still exhibit the same properties you describe. It won't be possible for anyone to redesign these systems to mitigate what you see are issues inherent to unrestricted democratization of communication and information.
Shouldn't we prepare for this eventuality and accept that this is the asymptote of human civilization, rather than asking gatekeepers to clean things up during this interregnum where the gatekeepers happen to hold a lot of power? It's like growing up with helicopter parents you cling onto despite the fact that you're going to have to face the world on your own when you turn 18.
There's not a chance that would ever get traction with a majority of people. The "normies" would be revolted by what they find on there, and trolls would have no one to troll but other trolls. Only the biggest trolls enjoy trolling other trolls. That's what 4chan is for. What you described is a more sophisticated version of 4chan which will have such gruesome content that half of 4chan's userbase would turn away in shock.
I'm not suggesting this would function like an anonymous imageboard (though there'll still be plenty of things like those for people who want them), either. Imagine using the app Signal without having to rely on Signal's servers or having to own a mobile phone. You'd use it just like you do now; there'd just be no middlemen between you and the people you talk to. The same can be true of Twitter or anything else. People would still have some control over what they see and don't see; they're not going to see everything from everyone at all times, unless they specifically decide to use such an app. We just need to wait a few decades for those alternatives to become much more polished and user-friendly for the average person.
The trend towards mesh-like, blockchain-like, decentralized, distributed, P2P networking seems pretty clear. I think the majority of things will probably still remain centralized even in a century, since there are many advantages to centralization, but these alternative mesh worlds are only going to get bigger and bigger.
It's definitely a complex issue, and many of these future decentralized apps may end up re-implementing some aspects of centralization through elections of volunteer moderators or some other kind of democratized system, but in those cases at least the mayors will actually be elected and have limited terms and could be recalled, unlike Zuckerberg.
Imagine the following discussion between Zuckerberg and his director of engineering:
Zuckerberg: "Hey why did we miss the deadline for making a new Tiktok-style app?"
Director: "well, we were going to code it in React Native, but then I realized that React Native is Illuminati George Soros trash so we started from scratch again. Also, deadlines are just a construct, you can never truly know how long it will take to complete something"
Zuckerberg: "have you lost your mind? This company played a large part in creating React Native and it has always worked well for us. And deadlines are indeed a construct, but they are a very useful one!"
Director: "I'm not sure you deserve to be CEO. I believe you are a satanist."
Zuckerberg: "Watch your mouth."
Director: "Free speech, I can do what I want. You said so."
Zuckerberg: "You're fired."
Director: "Am I really fired? I can't be fired by an invalid CEO."
Zuckerberg: "I can tell you what's real: Those guards behind you whom will escort you out of the building. The money you will no longer make. And the restraining order I will file if you report back for your now non-existent job. Goodbye."
If only Facebook tolerated pervasive post-truth for its userbase to the same degree that it tolerates post-truth in Menlo Park...
Additionally, it shouldn't be their job to nanny their users and judge what things they say are true or untrue and remove the untrue things, unless something's both untrue and likely to cause direct and imminent harm (like saying drinking bleach is proven to prevent COVID-19). Allowing third-party fact checkers to add commentary to consequential political posts is a reasonable and balanced compromise on Zuckerberg's part.
"Post-truth" is meaningless and completely subjective; impartial analysts should be able to address potentially true or false claims based on the evidence. "Post-truth" is "whatever you claim to be true and I claim to be not true". Truth isn't subjective, but judgment of truth is. One can cherry-pick cases where some surrogate says something clearly false and defends it with "we have a different view of what the facts are", but in the general case, having different views of the facts is the natural state of humanity and discourse.
I like Snopes, but I definitely do not want Zuckerberg to start acting like he's Snopes or enforcing what content can exist based on what Snopes says. I think (99.9% of) conspiracy theories are absurd and a scourge of society, but I don't think they should be classified as thoughtcrime or removed. I would fire an employee who was a zealous conspiracy theory proponent, but I would never sanction a user for being one, or for holding any other view I disagreed with or considered ridiculous. Snopes' voice should be given exposure but opposing voices shouldn't be kept from exposure unless there are extreme circumstances.
In my opinion, we should be asking ourselves how we could possibly improve the general public's epistemological faculties and approaches, rather than trying to tug-of-war-style yank their epistemological conclusions away from them. The former will help unite the US and the latter will continue to further divide it. Let's work at the meta level instead of the object level.
I don't use facebook because I don't want all my private info controlled by an external company.
But most people has chosen to use it, and have chosen to continue using it because the pros outweigh the cons for them.
The first monarch is usually elected. The offspring are the unelected.
At least I heard some populist say that so I'm sure it must be true.
More recently, the NY Times was a big proponent and probably helped drive a lot of the consensus that got America involved in the war in Iraq.
Compared to these, where Zuckerberg is not actually pushing an opinion but refusing to censor opinions, Zuckerberg is an amateur.
I think a lot of the hate that Facebook gets is from the old media that are seeing their influence wane and are blaming Zuckerberg.
Everyone and their literal grandmother is on Facebook.
Twitter is mostly restricted to news junkies and the tech crowd.
Now, unfortunately, Twitter matters.
But it's not odd at all. Zuck has been the only one to offer a tiniest bit of resistance to cultural Marxism and cancel culture. And he succeeded. The shadow cabal can't have that.
Your opinion on this is noted. But it's not "antisemitic" or a "conspiracy theory" in the least. CM is basically identity politics, abolition of nuclear family, and other commie bullshit like that. If you're denying the existence of that in today's discourse, I'm not sure what to tell you.
How so?
[0] not necessarily in all regards: “monopoly on violence” will be absent, but having the power to define rules and ban sub-communities or to actually negotiate with governments rather than just do what they are told
That seems like the wrong model. The power that we are worried about them exercising is over their users and the general public, not their workers. Your statement is like saying government workers should be able to vote who runs government because it is so powerful. The people we are worried about is the general public, not the workers.
And it wouldn't be unprecedented. The British East India Company was a defacto state of its own, and companies have been known to employ mercenaries like the Pinkertons or local warlords to enforce coercion through violence on their behalf.
But to answer your question, no, I don't think it would, because a company has a more direct coercive role over their employees than governments have over most of their citizens. Companies can fire their employees more easily than democratic governments can arrest or kill their citizens. The infrastructure for surveillance within a company can also be far more pervasive and fine-grained than with governments, simply because the scale is smaller.
I think your examples make such companies seem like totalitarian dictatorships.
(If I understand right, employers are not allowed total surveillance of their workforce here in Germany; my understanding is however as a non-native speaker).
> The infrastructure for surveillance within a company can also be far more pervasive and fine-grained than with governments, simply because the scale is smaller.
I’m specifically thinking of the largest companies, the ones whose workforce headcount (/turnover) overlaps with the population (/GDP) of small nations.
I don't think it would be a bad thing to have more representation on corporate boards of stakeholders besides shareholders, at least in companies that are so large and powerful that they have enhanced influence. Some fraction of seats should go to other groups like workers, customers, the general public, etc.
Voting is a very fascinating topic. If a person publicly endorses the mayor of Miami (or the CEO of Pepsi, or the President of Ohio State University) for President of the US 2020, many will criticize that person for throwing away their vote. Then half the country laments what terrible leadership we have, and how did these bozos get elected? It's always the fault of the other half.
Well, you have more liberty to vote about Facebook than you have to vote US2020. Just log off and never go back. Otherwise, don't complain about not getting a vote. If you did log off and never went back, complaining is kinda like always blaming the other half for the bozos in office.