Mark Zuckerberg is on the wrong side of history
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
If Zuckerberg is on the wrong side of history, its arc bends away from justice.
If Zuckerberg is on the wrong side of history,
its arc bends away from justice.
people are crying out for the [etc] to become the "arbiters of truth"
Your head is maybe crying out “people want these powerful corporations.” Because you’ve been trained to believe the shape of society has been achieved through organic debate over that shape.
Meanwhile, there’s plenty of evidence to show it’s nothing but corruption and manufactured consent.
When kids are told “this is the way it works”, did they ask for that adult existence?
As someone with a bachelors in math, having built go karts from welding the frame together up, worked on a farm delivering livestock, build homes foundation up, and spent the last 23 years writing code... I’d strongly challenge the concept that the people even need these companies.
I think the people are being sold a line. An implicit “see, this is what you want!” when the metrics to be pointed at to make that true is due to those metrics being the only option for measuring offered by economists.
I suppose you also believe every Nazi “wanted” the war, too.
Nation state citizen != state mouthpiece. What choice do they have though but to be counted as such when some knob on TV tells them their normal survival behavior of acquiring materials to mean “we want Google to sort our stuff” so keep letting Google do that!
so people say something like “mark zuckerberg is on the wrong side of history” and mean “even if mark zuckerberg can get away with his behavior for a long time, at some point in geologic time the people alive will know zuckerberg’s name and hold him in contempt”. this is a false, presumptuous comfort so i find the charge impotent.
history is being actively constructed in front of you. even “settled” topics we feel we can accurately assess who was on the right and wrong sides of whatever are being constantly societally negotiated. just as we can imagine an egalitarian future free of resource constraints where people who hoarded wealth are judged harshly, so too can we imagine a future where tech titans are revered as demigods. you can apply this same logic to the posture the future will adopt toward aspects of the present and the past. will the 1960s US civil rights movement be viewed positively and those who opposed it be viewed negatively for all time? i hope so, and i hope the reader does too, but there are no guarantees.
zuckerberg isn’t taking solace that in some imagined future his detractors will be regarded as nothing more than jealous petty luddites, he is burying your future now. his goal is to entirely foreclose the opportunity for the future to view him badly. he doesn’t need to be your friend, he only needs to ingratiate himself to the arbiters of the historical record—or better yet, make facebook’s product line become the historical record.
Much as I dislike Facebook (and I've never used it) I wouldn't count on these dopey claims of Facebook supporting racism and bigotry because they refuse to remove a politician the author doesn't care for (or whatever it is they are doing) making it to "how it really happened" in History 101.
Facebook s growth ended almost a decade ago, and its increasingly irrelevant
Censorship is the lazy and dangerously elitist alternative to doing the hard work of engaging those spreading falsehoods and debunking their arguments in the public forum.
And yes, Gavet here is advocating censorship, no matter much she tries to couch it in excuses and euphemisms.
best way to fight disinformation is to
challenge it with true information.
A better way to fight disinformation would be to challenge it with... an appeal to popularity.
But if Copernicus or Richard Feynman were alive and on Youtube today, they'd be unknowns compared to PewDiePie.
So neither sunlight, nor an appeal to popularity, are going to help us here.
I may not love censorship, but it beats having some deluded moron shoot at my car in a civil war, or infect me with Covid-19 thanks to a lecture by some Youtube science-ist.
If the choice is stricter Facebook moderation or to live in a new Dark Age... well, you catch my drift.
Yes, lets use censorship to improve our democracies.
Good idea! Let´s also put all those who disagree in prison.
Far more than 200,000 people can die in one year if we set up an apparatus of censorship, as these tools could always be commandeered by corrupt individuals and used to horrific effect.
Look at autocratic societies around the world, and see what giving any group, no matter how seemingly altruistic and enlightened, the power to censor, can lead to.
Once the social taboo against violating the right to free speech is broken, dystopia becomes a possibility, as it becomes possible for voices to be silenced and concentrations of power to magnify their control through constricting the flow of critical information.
Once the social taboo against violating the right
to free speech is broken, dystopia becomes a possibility
The types of censorship proposed in the article deal with expressing beliefs pertaining to highly complex and contentious social issues about which powerful special interests seek to shape the public's perceptions about. Once this class of speech becomes acceptable to subject to censorship, politics becomes a much more dangerous, winner-takes-all game.
History shows there exists a subset of issues that drive deep emotion or passion, whether for historical reasons or otherwise, for which this approach won't work. It assumes rational debate is possible in an environment antithetical to it. The hard part is defining that subset, in real-time, on a globalized planet. Hard to say that anyone is capable of this kind of definition.
Edit: I too don't think censorship works in the long-term. That doesn't mean we should throw our hands up at this problem and give up. It'll be with us whether we like it or not, so we as a society better solve it.
Public discourse is not a random walk. It is an evolving phenomenon that gets refined as the participants become more informed about the sources, arguments and facts relating to a subject. It's a messy and seemingly chaotic process, but over time, it works. The force of reason eventually sees through the lies, as long as there are those who persist in showing evidence of the falsehood of the lies.
Lies only work when discussions are superficial, and evidence for the various positions doesn't need to be compared. Substantive discussion exposes lies.
Even when it comes to those who, when shown convincing evidence that their beliefs are based on lies, stay wedded to those beliefs out of emotional/tribalistic attachment, it is valuable to go through the process of discrediting their beliefs, because it demoralizes them, and makes them less effective evangelists for their deluded view of the world.
The process of dialogue and debate is also valuable in its own right. It is beneficial to the population at large for people to make public their reasoning, sources and evidence in the attempt to demonstrate their claims are true.
Again, the benefits of debate are hard to observe on the shorter time scale. It can seem futile at times, especially when you want to immediately enlighten hopelessly deluded individuals, but the forces that guide the evolution of society work on longer time scales, and a determined effort to expose falsehoods and propagate truth through dialogue has benefits on that longer time scale through its long-term ripple effects.
If countering political misinformation with political information is hard, then public-minded individuals can increase their efforts 5 fold, to make up for the additional difficulty.
This, to me, seems far less costly than the risk-adjusted cost of introducing a new norm of society being more tolerant of censorship.