Propaganda, censorship, and surveillance are all attributes of monopoly
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On the surface, it increases efficiency through central management and automation, lowering the prices and making products more affordable.
One layer deeper, it commoditizes people's time, making them more replaceable and lowering what one's salary can buy even longer.
If you look even deeper, you see that when people are not spending their passion trading, making deals, and creating things others would want to buy, they instead turn on each other. If your work doesn't keep your mind busy, it finds a different outlet, that seems to be driven by some primal tribal instincts. Team up with the ones of your kind and go against the neighboring tribe.
Call me paranoid, but we might see another Fall of Rome in our lifetimes.
Commodification of people is treated extensibly in anticapitalist writings. ( https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Commodification )
> Call me paranoid, but we might see another Fall of Rome in our lifetimes.
There is a more moderate stance of American Decline ( https://www.wikiwand.com/en/American_decline ) that has been a source of sourness to many US nationalists
One meaning is marxist. Marx popularised the term and he implicitly defined it as an economic-political system and "that which we are fighting against." Most of his writing and communist contemporaries was about corruption and cruelty of this newly described system. In marxist capitalism, when a monopolist bribes a government official this is capitalism par excellence. The premise of the term is that "capital rules," so regulatory capture is assumed
The other meaning is pro-capitalist. These mostly riff on Adam Smith. David Ricardo responded directly to marx and provides some technical ammo. By Ayn Rand, "capitalism" it has a full blown utopian definition like communism. Regulatory capture is seen as a corruption of "true" capitalism.
Anyway... the two frames are highly related to eachother.
For my own "philosophy," I make a distinction between ideology and idealism. "Ideology" (in my personal lexicon) is to ideology as Orwell's "nationalism" was to nationalism.
An ideal (a capitalist one) is Adam Smith's pin factory or village economy. Maybe Ayn Rand's dissenting heros like Howard Roark or Hank Rearden.
An ideological take is to justify a fb or a google by insisting these are like a Smithian pin factory. Explaining good stuff in those term. Explaining bad stuff in terms of government (looters) involvement. Facebook's profits and market cap are reflective of the immense value that they provide society.
An idealistic take is criticising fb because the aren't like a Smithian pin factory at all. In fact, they prevent such pin factories from existing.
It's notable that an idealistic posture is easier and more common from a dissenting position. A ideological posture tends to be easier and more common in a defensive, incumbent position. That's probably why Ayn Rand reads as idealistic (despite being formulaically ideological) while modern pro-capitalists tend to come off as more ideological. Rosa Luxemburg the idealist vs Leon Trotsky, the ideologue.
IMO, you can't deal in absolutes. FB is easy to pick on because they are so unimpressive technically or operationally. FB could literally be done on 1% of its budget. Google is a mixed bag, because they do have technical achievements. But, what makes google their money is search and adware.
Tesla/Musk are an even more complex example. Musk is as close to a Randian hero as reality can offer. Obvious technical and operational achievements. Real, genuine risk taking. So far so good. The ideal does not appear to be trampled.
But... what happens if recent investors are right? What if Tesla's data is giving them an unassailable edge in self driving cars for a generation. Does that give us a capitalist ideal of innovation, competition and efficiency or a capitalist antipattern of control, monopoly and lock-in?
Reality is complex ideals are simple. Ideology is an attempt to square the circle by insisting on its squareness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi...
As they don't say in the asteroid Belt: Da Rom na decho dewe im wang diye. (Rome didn't fall in a day)
Edit: why even use earth days in the belt? maybe they'd count in shifts, maybe they'd use watches (of which there are many varieties, where the US submariners' reduce to shifts)?
(Then again, assuming attacks these days are more likely economic than kinetic, it looks like it took two months, May-July 1997, to take down THB. The longest market manipulation of which I am aware lasted 5 years, but those were only a pair of billionaires, so presumably trillionaires' poker played between nation states might go longer until someone folds.)
Arguably, Rome didn't even fall when Rome fell. A Roman emperor continued to rule over a roman empire from constantinople (which had already been the capital for a long time) for another millenium.
Western intellectuals just had an obsession with "the fall of rome" as a concept. Lots of historians studied tomes of the stuff. Everything can be projected onto it: social puritanism, christian puritanism, anti-christianity (they abandoned jupiter), anti-immigration sentiment, anti-german sentiment, etc.
In fact, even Rome built its public buildings and spaces to make it seem like the "new Rome," except that Rome to them was Athens or Mycenae.
There's a very direct line of descent from the White House to bronze age greek public architecture. That template for a building has meant "power" forever, and that's the symbolism everyone always goes for.
In my mind, the line goes forward, reflects and refracts through Europe, the Catholic church, the Renaissance; the Freemasons, whose first lodges in America were in Philadelphia; the "Sons of Liberty" gathering at the Green Dragon tavern - among them Paul Revere; Ben Franklin, who commissioned the design of the Great Seal of the United States, with the pyramid symbolism; and reaches George Washington, the first U.S. President and Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge in Virginia. And who were masons but builders and architects?
The morsels trace an admittedly sinuous and questionable lineage, lost and found across time and place, revived through myth and homage, and, I believe, still feeding some mad dreams of an empire.
You followed this statement with "call me paranoid, but we might see my tribe (presumably) fall out of dominance in our lifetime." The end of US hegemony is not some terrifying future, it's the US living like the rest of the world.
The issue most of the world (outside the US) worries about is not the end of their hegemony but the power vacuum that they leave behind.
Despite the near plutocratic state of the current US, they at least make an attempt at having core democratic values with checks and balances and a respect for rule of Law.
It is unclear if those who crave to take that soft-power away from the US will share the same ideals.
Turns out that the world was rather better off without us trying to run a big chunk of it and we were better off as well.
The US will be fine and might even become a better place once they stop being the most powerful country.
Why the hell would the rest of the world care about these things that only matter inside the United States? The US has never made it their goal to spread these "core democratic values," has no real checks or balances internationally, and shows a complete disregard for international law.
Except they never consider themselves subject to that law, just use it to punish those they don't like.
> democratic values
When have they ever spread this? The amount of democratic governments we've overthrown vastly outnumbers the successful ones we've created. And that's ignoring things like Operation Gladio.
>heavily shaded modern international trade
Which has enriched them far more than anyone else.
Mind you, most of the world lives in poverty fueled by endless tribal fights. Shia-vs-Sunni Muslims, Mexican drug cartels, endless tribal wars in Africa. Sponsored by the local "top ladder" successfully running the "divide and conquer" strategy. I don't see anything good in bringing that standard of living to the 1st World countries.
And, mind you, China is completely unaffected by the processes tearing the U.S. apart. They are more than ready to take the place, and also they don't give a slightest damn about human rights, freedom of association and many other Western virtues. Read about Uighur camps if you have any doubts. Be careful for what you wish for.
>And, mind you, China is completely unaffected by the processes tearing the U.S. apart
Isn't this the exact same " divide and conquer " strategy you just mentions? If we don't continue supporting our tribe, ignoring it's many faults, that other tribe will make things much worse.
Besides, the billionaires will be fine, it's the middle class that will find themselves living in ghettos.
Right, US billionaires would never develop an evil plan like exploit violence to make money. Those actions are just African nature.
If China were to gain more power though, obviously they would steal the middle classes' wealth and force them into poverty.
The US has been through periods like (and much worse) in the last 60 years:
- 60's race riots across most major cities that resulted in the deaths of hundreds & Vietnam War where every opinion article lamented about "America's global leadership is over"
- Watergate where a sitting president was forced from office due to truly breathtaking corruption and law breaking
- The 80's when Japan was on the rise and people talked about the US falling behind and no longer being a major economic player (I remember people smashing Japan electronics on the Whitehouse lawn)
- Gulf War, LA Riots, Clinton scandals, pre-9/11 terror attacks in the 90's
- In the 2000's, 9/11, the financial crisis (aka "The End of Capitalism")
It's always been like this.
America will be fine.
The widespread idea that somehow Modernity is a new, tabula rasa (blank slate) epoch in which the old rules and realities don't apply anymore.
“This time it’s different” comes up again and again (tech bubble, housing bubble) and it turns out, no, it’s not different.
The latest is MMT, in which people say “you can print as much money as you want without fears of inflation because this time it’s different”. And maybe it is? But there is a good chance that, no, it’s not different this time.
Also, pretty sure MMT knows that printing money leads to inflation. Thats why the theory has taxes to remove money as well, if you want to tax someone other then those who hold capital evenly (which is inflation).
You could argue that it means that we aren't sufficently historically literate but I don't see how it stands out as worse given ample precedent.
Current domestic issues have nothing to do with the Civil War. There is no state-like military complex ready to secede. There is no geographic division that lends itself to secession. Etc. etc. The only reason this is invoked is because it's the only meme that most people are aware of, not because it's even remotely accurate. Even something like the 90s Balkan Wars is so far from the contemporary American situation, it's absurd to compare it.
The only thing that's truly new is the media's profit motive for creating a perception of chaos.
Of course, the fact that things have worked out in the past doesn't mean they will always work out in the future. But people who compare contemporary America to the Fall of the Roman Empire or the American Civil War really don't know much about either.
- Immediately after a massively destructive war that affected all levels of society
- Populace of young men with PTSD and military experience
- Little/no social safety nets
- No history of democracy - remember that prior to Weimar, Germany was governed by Prussia and basically had no democratic traditions
IMO the real actual historical comparison to use in 2020 is the Printing Press and Protestant Reformation; i.e. established power structure (the Catholic Church) dealing with new information-propagation technologies and factions. I'd bet that 2050 is going to look a lot like 1550.
Take the Vietnam War for example - what’s taught in school is the Domino theory, support for a corrupt Southern government, quagmire, withdrawal and fall of the South. But, if you read through a bit of the Pentagon Papers you pretty quickly get a sense of how nuanced it was and how it wasn’t a single decision to support South Vietnam, it was a complex web of global geopolitics with messy arguments, fears, overconfidence, “fake news”, etc. And the people making those decisions were not dumb, in fact, they were pretty damn smart and considered a lot of different options and the risks that went with them. It just didn’t turn out how they thought it would.
And then it dawns on you just how much history is repeated over and over. Sure it’s a little different each time (and those small differences have a big impact), but the same types of things happen again and again.
Anyone who calls calls for the fall of empire, without explaining how we avoid the normal consequnces, is calling for more violence.
Empire is violence, and so is revolution.
If you don’t have an alternative, and you support either one, then you are advocating for violence.
You seem to be advocating for more violence.
One difference between centralisation due to monopolies and centralization due to other things (government planning, industry-scale unions, etc.) is that monopolies are highly profitable regardless of efficiency.
Going broke is what usually kills things.
The macrofinancial situation, currently, is telling. We are obviously in the midst of a recession. Huge industries are in meltdown: hospitality, air travel, physical retail, etc. They are literally producing far fewer goods and services... stuff that people normally consume.
OTOH indexes are up. Why, because the profits of H&M or RyanAir are miniscule compared to fb or amzn regardless.
Consider what "increases efficiency .., lowering the prices and making products more affordable" means for fb or google. There are no prices, except ad prices. We can't even think about consumer benefits (more, better goods) in a meaningful way. What does more facebook even mean? Is it beneficial to anyone?
This matters because "more resources to fb, less to Ryanair" is the market working normally. Since fb doesn't consumer capital, all that happens is a stock price change.
The fact that the us government took zero equity positions despite bailing out the wealthy will be discussed for decades.
TLDR money printer go brrrrrrrr
This cycle has definitely a proven point now about how asset prices are a fungible for currency inflation. Every flavour is different though... with this kind of inflation, what what government y prints, government y receives. A central bank handles the deficit, but the asset inflation is global, not limited to a national currency. Probably destabilizing in a game theory sense.
That said, there's also the fact that for amzn, 2020 has really made prospects X% better. X% of amzn makes up for a lot of Y% worse in companies that do worse in a pandemic. There's a definite correlation between company size and prospects in this crisis year.
On government equity, I agree. Macroeconomics needs a do over. I think norway proves the principle of governments owning equity stakes pretty handily.
Incidentally, Norway would probably have been (could still be) an even bigger success case if they adjusted even more boldly. A lot gets lost on regular price inflation.
So we have a metric of resources you need to keep people under control vs resources you would need to release to people if you did not control them. This number is currently very low through automation, fake news optimisation etc.
So elites get all the resources secondly they give out to affiliates (Roman's debts forgiven, discount wheat for Romans, land to 75k Romans) then it becomes unsustainable because it has giveaways have no solid economic foundation, then affiliates become strong, then make everyone Roman so as to dilute power and then the former affiliated secondary elites stop helping and/or revolt and through their organizational capability also everybody else joins them, sometimes through unrelated incidents. But Rome has already fallen years ago, and after the actual rubber stamp, most people except those at the center of empire are better off. What is missed, is products of economies of scale, but people have already learnt to hate them along the insurmountable accompanying taxes.
All of these events happened around the end of the Roman Republic. Blaming them for the "Fall of Rome" that happened around five hundred years later is just ridiculous. A rough equivalent would be blaming Columbus for America's current problems.
More or less you have summarized Karl Marx's conclusions in Das Kapital. "as capital accumulates the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse". The commoditization of peoples time is the way the capitalism extracts value from work.
And yes, this last stage of capitalism will be the toughest for the people..
The Western Roman empire took around 80 years to fall. From 395 to 476.
The Eastern Roman empire lasted for several hundred years more.
It's sometimes thought of as a quick obvious event, but it wasn't, it lasted a lifetime. We may already be in the period of time that future historians will refer to as 'the fall'. It may not be obvious from within what stage we are at, or when thee start was.
As for Eastern Roman Empire it lasted for several centuries but after VII/VIII century and loss of Africa, Egypt, Syria (main sources of manpower and grain) it became only local power at best.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century#:~...
The problem with any loss of American power is that potential great powers that could replace it, such as China, are deathly reliant on American lead order. China is neither energy nor food secure. How will they manage when their shipping isn't defended by the USN? How will they manage when climate change strains available resources? Especially when they are so geographically isolated from potential sources of those resources, and rivals are closer to those resources.
That’s true if you look at America’s rivals on the world stage, i.e. Russia or China. But Rome wasn’t sacked by the Persians, or the Egyptians, or another Great Power of the time. It was sacked by tribal Gauls and migrating tribes of Visigoths.
Certainly the germanic tribes as a whole can be considered a local "great power" and the huns certainly qualify as a great power.
> Thinking about how agricultural subsidies are like this classic example of inefficiency but also a big part of the reason the US still has a strong agricultural base.
I'm noodling on notions, and some recent commentary by Cory Doctorow sparked much of this, or rather, gave cause to expand a recent HN comment.
This is quite possibly wrong in parts or whole. Critiques welcomed.
Though it seems fairly clear that the ills dominating recent discussions of the Internet and media aren't merely incidental to monopoly but integral to it. And that monopoly itself is a control structure.
The question's been raised in discussion elsewhere about whether or not smaller / cloistered discussions might also give rise to propaganda. My thinking is "possibly, but likely to a lesser degree'.
See, e.g.,
https://rollenspiel.social/@ArneBab/105027882621910913
And Rhysy's comment on the linked article, "I think diversity is necessary but not sufficient": https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e...
the connection to the economic concept of monopoly (which, for that one commenter who will otherwise insist, is not one company crowding out all others in a market, but rather a company having effective control of a market regardless of relative size) seems tenuous at best. how is propaganda, censorship, and surveillance inherent properties of an entity controlling the friend social network market (i.e., facebook) rather than an inherent property of the centralization of social networks (for instance)?
For regulatory purposes in the US, "monopoly" does not match either your definition nor the one I was taught in my intermediate microeconomics coursework.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20625775
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
Propaganda, censorsship, and surveillance are not the only concerns regarding monopoly. But within the media and communications domain, it seems that the problems and market-power structure are inherently linked.
If there are any other points needing addressing I'd be happy to hear them.
If not, then any information system with a few powerful broadcast nodes is indistinguishable from a propaganda machine. Hence monopoly == propaganda.
I like [1],[2]. It is sometimes interesting to think about how systems look when edges have different meanings.
[1] https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/ufiles/i...
[2] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/new-mental-model-comput...
There are useful ... tools ...though other terms are often employed.
Propaganda is information or media that is purposefully designed to mislead, misinform or misdirect the reader and/or cause them to spread it to more readers, willfully.
The ones I've seen are often one political ideology being positioned against another.
Just because you like the misleading message, does not make it less misleading.
Just because you are anti something that you consider bad, does not make you good, and more important than that, does not make you better than what you denounce.
Hitler was anti-comunist and Stalin anti-fascism. They used the anti "something horrible" as an excuse to grab all power without supervision.
I collect propaganda posters, and have lots of Russian communist ones. I study those. Communist has always been experts on propaganda and giving misleading messages.
> "Propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of public or mass-produced communication designed to affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific public purpose, whether military, economic, or political."
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pag...
Yeah, when it's done to serve interests of private industry, it's called "marketing."
>According to Bernays’ own account he was informed by Karl von Wiegand, foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspapers, that in 1933 Goebbels was using his PR classic Crystallizing Public Opinion ‘as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany’.
https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/original-influence...
The idea of dropping the "propaganda" moniker in favour of "public relations" because of the Nazi association is likely true though.
https://theconversation.com/the-manipulation-of-the-american...
I'm convinced that if some developer had sought to replace svn by thinking directly in your terms-- i.e., how can I seek to decentralize this thing-- they would have ended up with a complicated mess of a system which would be even worse at handling issues of data integrity for the end user.
I don't understand the fetish for decentralization. Why isn't the focus instead on finding the low hanging fruit of simple, centralized software which can be easily tested and quickly deployed to defend against the dark patterns we know are used to manipulate people online?
With all the (duplicated) effort to build decentralized systems that necessarily rely on gold being found at the end of open research rainbows, we could instead already have a deep set of contingencies for, say, the impending milestone when Google finally defeats the ad blockers that keep HN in its cush little bubble.
The problem is lock-in. I want to have some agility wrt the central nodes I use.
Why cant you migrate your social graph off of Facebook, or route messages from your preferred node to someone who uses Facebook?
I have a love-hate relationship with the centralisation-decentralisation debate. Much radical decentralisation advocacy seems to embody little more than wishful thinking. Centralisation affords efficiencies, but at a cost of resilience, as has been widely realised of late, and of power control, if my notions here are accurate.
One possible resolution is to accept necessary, or inevitable, network control points / monopolies, but to ensure that control is shared, distributed, democratic, and/or principled. Public utlities, multiple stakeholders, public input, and the like.
Capture, corruption, apathy, mismanagement, incentives alignment, and the like, remain risks.
In light of the monopoly-power-control dynamic, though, I see frames for analysing and room for thinking about how federated systems should be structured to avoid creating cryptic control loci.
As an example, Mastodon (on which part of this discussion is occurring) saw a remarkably bad interactiion two hears ago when a set of griefers followed Wil Wheaton from Twitter and swamped Mastodon's feeble harassment and abuse detection-and-mitigation systems (they've been improved, I'm given to understand).
Diaspora, where I'd posted this article, has a nagging (though unclear if growing or just persisting) issue with disinformation and propaganda dissemination. On the one hand, effects are pretty limited without algorithmic amplification. On the other, blocking, reporting, and content- or account-removal seem ...underpowered.
The worse forms of abuse seem infrequent, though, which is a good sign.
Anyway all I can really offer is to flame and stress less, if there’s something exciting about economics and journalism to you just focus on that. Don’t shoehorn the wonky excitement into something sideways-adjacent to FAAMG companies.
> This website requires JavaScript to function properly. If you disabled JavaScript, please enable it and refresh this page.
Please consider making your site accessible to people not using it? Javascript is a control structure and surveillance tool.
A common complaint against federated structures (whenever I’m involved in this debate) is the claim that it’s much harder to fight spam & malicious actors than centralized systems operating at scale (which can afford to devote resources to this problem).
I find that claim quite unconvincing, and believe that the problem is manufactured by the existence of centralized systems. In decentralized systems, effects of malicious action (be it spam or misinformation of any kind) are localized and controlled — and cannot scale to have large impact (thus also providing some disincentives for malicious action).
Most forms of communications/informational abuse also seem to follow the propaganda / censorship / surveillance framework. Certainly spam, various forms of devoicing, and targeted harassment (bullying, brigading, doxxing, swatting).
Countermeasures fall into what I term hygiene factors, and much of my current thinking runs very strongly along epidemiological lines (and did so well before our recent viral symbiote emerged): addressing breeding reservoirs, transmission vectors, surveillance (of dysfunctional/toxic behaviours), susceptibility, treatment, isolation, and the like.
Distributed and decentralised approaches can work, and there are examples of these. From the world of spam: DNSBLs, SpamHaus, IronPort, pg's own Bayesian classifiers, and the like. How much added gain GD AI ML offers, and how much that relies of exclusive data monopolies, I'm not sure.
One further point that's going to be lost here, but what the hell: it's not entirely necessary of even possible to dismantle all informational (or other) monopolies. My key point has been to join the three ills which seem to be the subject of much present discussion as having a common enabling factor. And that discussing the issues separately or without consideration of etiology has little value. Sometimes the answer will be dismantling sometimes it will be to modify governance, ensuring public, social, and or commonweal orientation; sometimes to create counterveilling power blocs to balance forces.
Why Monopolies Make Spying Easier (2013); https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/why-mono...
Well worth reading, similar logic, excellent examples.
> Speakers and Audiences — a public — divided across independent networks, with access to different editorial selection, from different distribution networks, with access to different input message streams, are far less subject to propaganda, censorship, or surveillance. Epistemic diversity resists control.
One downside is if factions can’t reconcile their views we get into heavy information warfare between little echo chambers like we do today, and we haven’t seem the downstream consequences of this in full effect. The AIs of the “non-mainstream” information channels we use, twitter, youtube, facebook, reddit, instagram etc, are very good at diverisfying their information streams to micro-target individuals, but with absolutely the wrong objective function; to increase engagement, not to increase sensemaking. The result is more stratified cultural factions with little hope of reconciliation and conversation in between.
And for certain things, the reality has the monopoly we strive to converge to. Scientific process doesn’t necessarily reward diversity, but it reliably rewards relevance and approaching to reality. For matters like how covid spread, whether masks worked etc, we would have loved to subjected ourselves to the monopoly of what it really was in itself, but instead we made another information warfare out of it, heavily politicized every bit of data, causing tons of unnecessary human death suffering in between.
Therefore the problem is not the topology of the information network, but the incentive scheme driving the network. Today we all answer to the normativity of markets, not patriotism, not religion, not intellectual honesty, merely markets, so changing the shape of the network would achieve so little to change the downstream consequences.
Maybe the title (which I assume was clipped for HN length) might be more of a draw for some here using the plural ("Monopolies") or "Monopoly Control" as used in the article a few times?
Maybe not, just flagging it fwiw.
A monopoly on violence is an extremely good thing: its absence is called a "civil war".
More importantly, monopoly on violence by the state is only good if the control of the state is distributed democratically to all affected by it, ie, if the control over violence is redistributed to all people equally. If violence is held in a monopoly by a small group of individuals for their personal benefit... then civil war is a better option.
And corporations are structurrd exactly like that sort of despotism.
Either way, my point was precisely that there are conditions on monopolies that make them beneficial.
And hence the "in itself" condition fails.
And yes, some monopolies may be useful, or have useful attributes.
Key point I'm making are that:
1. Censorship / propaganda / surveillance / manipulation (CPSM if you will), are integral capabilities and attributes of informational monopoly.
2. All monopoly is inherently a control and power structure.
Government represents both attributes, and may be broadly beneficial, representing the people and promoting commonweal, or tyrannical, representing and benefitting an oligarchic minority.
So do business structures, cults, religions, military groups, mafia / organised crime syndicates, broadcast networks, online social media networks, newspaper publishers, film studios, transport networks, retail marketing networks, ...
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarc...
This essay addresses etiology.
My key point has been to join the three ills which seem to be the subject of much present discussion as having a common enabling factor. And that discussing the issues separately or without consideration of etiology has little value. Sometimes the answer will be dismantling sometimes it will be to modify governance, ensuring public, social, and or commonweal orientation; sometimes to create counterveilling power blocs to balance forces.
- the post really talks about cohesive platforms of all sizes: a topical forum can easily have the same aspects even though members may migrate at any time.
- countries might come out of the current ruckus with an understanding that massive centralization and platforms is something to worry about, in a lawmaking and enforcing way, even if it's not monopolies. Because it's a centralization of power, albeit indirect power so far. Of course, this problem is just what cyberpunk prophesized, so it's interesting to see how countries deal with expanding rule of corporations: namely if the US rethinks or confirms its position that corporations are just fine.
About propaganda, there are some kinds of person that never miss the opportunity to tell you what they think about their pet topic. Any community that doesn't allow to ignore them is bad for mental health. It used to work for thematic forums, with rules about off-topic. If the topic is more open, politics creep in.
I dropped my Facebook account, only interact with Twitter and mastodon from time to time and can see your point.
But the thing is, once you are in Facebook you get to see that most of the world propaganda is there and the whole platform is conditioned (and monetized, but not on your interest).
So you get to see the benefits of a platform like Facebook and the evil of facebook (the platform) being Facebook (the company).
One thing here it's not clear to me: this include the monopoly of force holds by governments?
Government has a monopoly on the claim to legitimate use of force. All elements of this statement are crucial. The Libertarian objection neglects to consider "claim", "legitimate", and most aspects of "monopoly".
I do agree and understand that, and I'm not a libertarian. My main issue here is that big governments has the same issues than big companies. We must break then all, not only big companies. My provocation was about that, not the use of force per si, so I may use the wrong words in the previous post.
It seems to me that mandating federation between social network platforms, using proven open standards, falls within (or very close to) the requirements that such a law already puts onto large data controllers, which should make it an uncontroversial remedy for the EU anti-trust authorities to demand.
That has the potential to be extremely effective. Anyone using a service solely for the network effect could switch to another one, which could be a large fraction of the users and reintroduce meaningful competition.
The biggest problem is protocol complexity. If Facebook adds some kind of timeline feature or anything like that, do they have to add it to the protocol other providers interface with Facebook using? If so, they can stamp out competition by adding so much complexity to the protocol that challengers can't keep up with it. If not, they can add features that challengers can't interface with. And expecting technologically-sideways regulators to arbitrate that sort of thing is a big ask.
Sounds like a fun project.
Because FB consumption happens 99% on their own webpage and mobile client.
That's really the biggest issue when it comes to switching services, keeping your contacts and primary communication intact.
Universal identity, you can maybe solve with email. But there are problems like requiring using real name, multiple accounts etc
Interoperability between messengers will be limited to maybe text and images. Even on this there are huge problems, imagine snapchat vs fb.
Facebook, et al, could provide restricted APIs that let another authorized service gain access to your information via your user identifier. I imagine they provide partial access for favored partners already.
What we're talking about here is pure software interop. There is no standard, and any standard that would be devised would become a quickly-outdated albatross around the neck of the developers. Imagine writing code to interface with someone else's crap API, except now you're required to do it by law, and any new feature you come up with has to be either shoehorned into it, or more likely, go through a long and bureaucratic approval process, or even more likely, simply never shipped.
Now pretend instead of Facebook, it's your instance of Mastodon that you want to hack on. HN doesn't have the requisite font face options for the magnitude of NO F'ING WAY that is my reaction to getting the government this deep into the nuts and bolts.
Cellphone carriers argued that number portability was too hard or too expensive.
"But cell phone companies argue counter that the idea of portability should be scrapped because customers aren’t demanding it. They argue that implementing portability, which involves retooling the software of each carrier’s computerized call-routing system, would be expensive and technically complicated.
“The cost to be able to move numbers from one carrier to the other is significant, and it would be significant for the customer too,” said John Scott, deputy general counsel for Verizon Wireless. “Our argument is that it’s not necessary to promote competition.”
Carriers Aim to Kill Number Portability - 2002
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-16-fi-cell1...
This is materially different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-gave-some-companies-pr...
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/fact-check/201...
> But some researchers dispute that ad-targeting is any different than selling data.
> "As a data scientist, I am shocked that anyone continues to believe this claim," wrote Michael Kosinski, assistant professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, in a New York Times opinion piece. "Every time you click on a Facebook ad, Facebook sells data on you to that advertiser."
> "This is such a basic property of online targeted advertising that it would be impossible to avoid, even if Facebook somehow wanted to."
A slightly deeper analysis would ask first "What are the incentive structures in a system where people can seamlessly migrate from one provider to another?".
We have already seen that Facebook, as a monopolistic provider, is too big to fail, and it can keep paying the meagre fines for its non-compliance with the rules, while lobbying and threatening[0] and exploiting its election-influencing power to ensure the regulations don't significantly limit its assault on users' privacy.
It's not hard to imagine that if 20 different companies were competing for users, they might act in ways that better protect users' privacy. In fact the competitive pressure on them would be twofold, since not only could users move to different providers, but users could also refuse to connect to a friend on a network whose policies they do not trust.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/sep/22/facebook-...
Presumably the reason email servers can operate legally is that the sender of each email is deemed to be the data controller or is otherwise giving explicit consent to their private data being sent to each recipient's mail provider.
Social networking is roughly equivalent to the sending of emails BCCed to everyone in your address book. In the case of something like Twitter-style microblogging, the GDPR is even less relevant since the user is deliberately trying to make information publicly available.
I agree that you could probably make Facebook with no public pages work, or something like Twitter where there's minimal public information in the first place.
1:
Propaganda is not (no longer?) limited to centralized control. Advertising is an example of fully decentralized propaganda, where the actors don't have any kind of real central control, but if their goals align, they'll amplify a single message to the level much larger than a monopoly ever could.
Perhaps we could call it mob-style propaganda. Mobaganda?
2:
The way I feel it, propaganda is about making a large group of people believe things that aren't true, but benefit some other group of people. Said beneficiaries of the propaganda may be the original source of the message - but even historically, propaganda only works if some of the audience believes it and starts convincing/socially pressuring others into believing it too.
So the core operational element here is just a meme that spreads. Centralization is orthogonal.
--
Basically, I feel that old school propaganda was just a way to forcefully spread a selected meme. It happened in an era where most media was unidirectional - from a small group of people operating newspapers, radio and television, to a large group of people who could only view it and perhaps comment between each other, but their response wasn't broadcast to a wide audience. These days, with our hyperconnected social media where everyone is a publisher of thoughts, memes can spread without much effort. You don't need force of a central power anymore for an idea to travel; memes amplify themselves now, as they spread through our bidirectional media.
And this means not only that propaganda isn't restricted to a central power, but also that it doesn't have to have any intent behind it. All it takes is for someone to accidentally craft a meme that resonates with people, and it'll get amplified. If it incidentally benefits a group of people, that group will ensure it gets amplified further.
The problem is, said meme doesn't have to be in any way correct, reasonable, or corresponding to observable reality.
Not at all. Centralization is absolutely crucial to deliver advertising.
Getting a bigger audience to attract larger advertisers is what pushed newspapers, radios, television channels and finally web services to become behemoths.
If monopoly is defined solely in terms of dominance it is ironically possible for there to be a decentralized monopoly as technically anyone can enter by any means but there is one big fish in the pond. I dislike that definition of monopoly personally because a monopoly with no concrete barriers to entry feels like an absurd abuse of the term.
The distinction between macro- and micro-propaganda gets to a few elements:
- Mass propaganda, let's call it Goebbellian propaganda, relies on targeting the same message to a very large audience. Often a Big Lie, but always simple, clear, and heavily repeated.
- Targeted propaganda pits individuals (or identifiable, but small, market segments, against an extensive data store (past behaviours, activities, and behavioural models), and machine intelligence. The individual is pitted against trillion-dollar corporations or state actors, yottabyte-sized data stores, and predictive and AI behavioural models.
With macropropaganda at least the message is publicly evident. With micropropaganda it may be impossible to determine what is or isn't manipulation as well as what manipulations are targeted as which individuals or groups.
The targeting element of micropropaganda still pressumes some sort of targeting. To take an example, Cambridge Analytica would have been much less successful if it had to, say, pull data from 100s of individual ISPs' personal home pages, email and chat logs, and inconsistent data formats and standards. Facebook's one-stop shopping of users, activity logs, data standards, and integrated activity across a wide range of services and third-party site integration, created CA's opportunity.
The messaging may not be centralised, but the enabling infrastructure must be.
https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/105024594626128707
Adding to that:
The observation that medium shapes messaging isn't new (see McLuhan), but is worthwhile. Network topology, scale, directedness, and other characteristics, drive and dictate possible interactions. It's not accidental that radio pioneers borrowed both the name and business model of farmers; broad-casting seeds into a fertile medium and harvesting the returns through bulk and undifferentiated mechanical processes.
As I've noted elsewhere, the specific defining property of propaganda is intent serving a cause. Accidental memes are viral, but unless coopted, not themselves propagantistic. In Dawkins' conception, such memes selfishly serve only themselves.
Corporations privatize their profits (to themselves) and socialize their risk (to government). Eliminate the ability to socialize their risk and it's incumbent upon corporations to respond to market forces, creating competition, reducing barriers of entry, etc. This all makes sense to me from a free-market perspective.
From my experience the ancap positions are the most philosophically consistent, taking into account the large majority of economic and ethical variables. The only problem I have with ancaps is that they usually fail to acknowledge the third rail of politics and as such fall into the same trap as the libertarians.
It's one thing to envision a system which minimizes authoritarianism and maximizes personal liberty. It's another thing to actually implement that system from where we are, not where we would like to be.
For example, if we minimize (or abolish) government too early, we create a vacuum which invariably will be filled by existing corporate combines. I'll add this argument has been made before by ancaps against libertarianism, so the problem isn't exactly foreign to them. In contrast, break up the corporate combines without also reducing the power and authority of the state and we temporarily fix the monopoly problem while leaving the door wide open for the exact same thing to repeat (as we are seeing today).
There are undoubtedly smarter people than me working on this problem but in my estimation it's absolutely critical for ancaps to outline incremental steps (in the correct order) towards the solution and not fall on their swords because those incremental steps may not represent the most philosophically pure end result from the outset (like what's happened with libertarians).
On the antitrust side... Courts and antitrust law are completely ill equipped to deal with modern monopoly. Everything must be funneled through a 19th century lens.
On the regulatory side... it might be even worse. We need to keep in mind that regulators are usually monopoly enforcing. Look at banks, traditional media, etc. The difference between a regulated fb and an unregulated one may be that fb can blame the regulator for censorship. This is how it works in a bank. Whatever mindless bureaucracy exists, everyone can just claim it's mandated. Meanwhile, it makes competition less likely. A "privacy preferences" popup approach will not help us with our monopoly problem.
Courts: The recent EU adwords case is a great example. They found unequivocally that adwords monopolises search ads, and use this monopoly to suppress competing search engines who have to sell ads on the adwords network. Google got a $1.5bn fine. Similar cases against amazon marketplace. To Google, it's a cost of doing business, and google would have undoubtedly paid that much just to get the narrow benefits proven in court. Monopolies are not a narrow phenomenon though. Whatever can be proved in court is the tip of an iceberg, almost by definition. If courts focus on the narrow (they are), then maneuvering around court decisions is trivial.
Meanwhile, consider this: If Toyota (workers, machines.. everything) fell of the disc tomorrow, the world would have less auto manufacturing capacity. It would take time and resources to rebuild. If facebook fell off the disc, the social media vacuum would be filled near instantly. There would be no social media supply issues.
This is where modern monopolies depart from 19th century monopolies. Courts may have wanted to liberalize (eg) the market for steel, but they didn't want to crash it. We still needed their steel. We don't really need facebook's "steel." Whether fb makes $100bn on ads or 1% of that, we will have plenty of social media. There is no (public interest) reason to step (on fb) lightly, but courts can't really make these distinctions.
IMO, the only answer is to act against size itself, and make decisions on a case-by-case basis. Also IP. Say Tesla does get to self driving years ahead of everyone because data... do they now get a monopoly forever? The poverty of our public domain is going to become increasingly relevant.
Given, for example, that AMZN "are the market" in a meaningful sense, why not make their sales data disclosable. That data is being proven in court to be a monopolistically potent. Give other market participants access. Advertising even moreso. This data is of major public interest
In the instances where each of these 3 attributes (Propaganda, censorship & surveillance) -- are also essential part of a business model -- I would call those specific large businesses as Super-Monopolies.
If we look at any large and successful business that has the above, plus is in the business of end-user Advertisement (that is in the business of promoting one thing over another .. that's advertisement for end consumers).
It fits into a 'super-monopoly' bucket.
It must surveil (to understand the target audience), and it must do it covertly.
It must censor (remove, downplay, gray-out content that does not fit the business model, or, as we see lately, the political bias of the org's leadership)
It has to monopolize the market place, so that every end-user 'walks through a single door'.
It will use propaganda to pacify critical thinkers, and to mislead folks with less developed 'critical thinking' -- that they are 'not a monopoly by any stretch', that they are just and fair, and hard working... As that's a necessary function to survive in a system with anti-trust laws.
- - -
What is, of course, very notable about these 3 attributes -- that they are also a must for Dictatorships and Monarchy style of government.
- - -
If the above is an accepted analogy. There are 2 positions about it ( a) -- that's good, continue on (b) no, that's bad, we need to have constitutional checks that this cannot happen, even if most powerful people try to do it.
- - -
So what could constitution (assuming that it cannot be changed) could look like to prevent a 'country-wide' analogy of a monopoly - a Dictatorship?
- - -
Well, the first thing, is to agree, that no matter how fair-minded, or 'saint' a person is -- given enough power, he/she will get corrupt.
That applies for groups of people as well as for individual.
- - -
Therefore, the first solution -- is power distribution. Under no circumstances political, economic and military power can be concentrated within the power of the same group of people.
That means 'de-centralization', and more practically 'de-urbanization'. Meaning that having small geographical areas and their elected representative wielding most power is good for Dictatorship. So a Constitution must prevent that.
The nuance there is what is 'economic power'. Well that's mostly means, control of tax revenue, and control of within country trade.
Therefore, a good constitution, to avoid corruption would:
- Prohibit same group of people to control tax revenue, to control laws of intra-country trades
- Prohibit same group of people (as above) from having control of military force. And prevent military from interfering within the border.
- Prohibit same group of from forcing a 'single choice' of any article of commerce, education, health.
- Prohibit same group from enforcing any emigration choices (meaning if the person wants to leave the country, they can).
--
Other thing that a good Constitution would do, is to enable the voting citizens to be the 'final backstop', the final judge to decide if actions of elected officials are constitutional or not,.. the final police police, acting as a threat with force, speaking allegorically.
With regard to comment
> I am pretty certain, if our society manages to survive the current times, our attitude to centralization and globalization will change
I think it may be more nuance. Or at least, I am trying to come up with the framework that will let me understand if the country will change and how...
I am speculating, that has to do with 'critical thinking' abilities of voting public...
I have came to read somewhere, that critical thinking is more like an 'immune system'.
We are not born with it, instead ,it develops over time, by experience. When meeting with bad, malignant information, manipulation and lies.
Just like immune system that gets stronger when surviving infections deceases.
Critical thinking does not directly correlate to our cognitive gifts, just like immune system may not be a reflection of visible physiological gifts.
With that analogy, we can say there always be a portion of voting population (due to age, particular environment that they were brought up, fear, etc.) -- that will have somewhat reduced critical thinking (or have in decline) compared to others.
That is, those folks have reduced cognitive immunity to being manipulated. And that deficiency can change (improve or get worse) over time... (it is not static).
Depending on how string & aggressive the malignant manipulation of people is in a particular period -- and depending on the percentage of folks with delayed development of critical thinking at that same period -- we will have different outcomes.
It is that ratio of how virulent manipulative malignancy is, divided by percent of voting population with underdeveloped critical thinking, that will decide the outcome for a country in a particular time period.
- - -
Without claiming an affinity to a particular side in the current US politics, I would say that it appears (at least to me ), that percentage of voting public with underdeveloped critical thinking, is higher now than was say 35 years ago or so.
If we can agree on the percentage of underdeveloped critical thinkers in the current voting population. Then if we can agree on the measure of malignant manipulation (that, underneath reflects stakes)
Then if we agree and find these ratios in other consequential historical periods. We will be able to 'predict' what will happen, with, hopefully, better certainty.
I know this may easily fall into confirmation bias, as we start picking and choosing the percentages, etc. But nevertheless, I hope the above represents a 'framework' to apply.
Like always there is a balance to be made.
They're generally promoted and amplified by systems optimising for something other than epistemic validity: advertising, engagement, political interest, interest marketing, etc., etc.
Who is the second? Evola?
Any specific elements?
inb4 > Churchill was a fascist, let's tear down his statues.
Would Toole's Ignatius J. Reilly count as one of his positive nihilists?
Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILSr9BbhoJQ
Edit: in an attempt to steelman, how's this for a much shorter, much less political, Evola?
1. Know thyself
2. Act don't react
3. Ubuntu (a person is a person through other people)
1. Sasa sif
2. Du fosh pash du efa
3. Nawit kapawu bera kuxakuThis is a genuine question. I would love propaganda, censorship, and surveillance to be non-existent but I can't really see a viable alternative. That would be cool if we could make the people immune to propaganda by means of education but I'm sure there will always be plenty of people who would remain easy to manipulate.
My essay concerns the fact that propaganda (and other activities, often but not at all exclusively the domain of state actors) rely on and exploit monopoly structures.
One fairly obvious corollary is that "if you build it", where "it" os a communications or information network exhibiting monopoly control points, "they will come", they being propagandists, censors, and surveillors.
Which is pretty much what Shoshana Zuboff was writing in the 1980s, see her eponymous laws.
That states and other large organisations (see: Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the IBM songbook, etc.) rely on propaganda, censorship, and surveillance (James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State), means that yes, they effectively operate in a competitive and selective landscaape in which if they don't develop such capabilities, or countermeasures against them, their adversaries will. This will happen through the most monopolistic communications structures available, whhich is my point.
Samples, by no means exhaustive:
propaganda https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#c...
censorship https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#c...
surveillance https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#c...
And of course the origin of propaganda is the church....
Until we understand the root causes, we are headed towards either mass censorship or revolution.
My comment could not be more useful or relevant. If most people think like this and don't see the obvious link, then we are surely headed for disaster.
The employee and the passive shareholder will always get screwed over in the end. Always.
Surveillance and control will extend to absolutely everyone. Even the top 1%. Freedom and control will be in the hands of a tiny number of people. You can already see signs of this today.
Now they manipulate people through thought leadership and the media, but once people have given up their basic freedoms, corporations will be able to coerce people at will. It will not be your shares or your money anymore because what you will be able to do with them will be severely restricted. It will all be done in the name of financial stability and safety.
Warren Buffet is known for an investment strategy that diminished diversification and instead encouraged investing in businesses that you actually understand. The argument is essentially that diversification is an investment tool for the ignorant who lack the time or inclination to research what it is they are actually investing in.
Combining that investment strategy with your argument: selective and informed investing is not only the safe bet but also the ethical one.
The scary thing is that diversification is done on auto-pilot these days. Superannuation funds, 401K funds and other pension funds take a share of each person's income and diversify it into a number of large corporate monopolies/stocks by default without their knowledge.
So the system is turning people's own money against them.
Back on topic, the institutional investors having a diversification default also occurred to me when I read your comments. It raised a lot of questions in my mind that I don't have the answers to. What percentage of the market is represented by institutional investment versus non-institutional investment where at least the investors have the option of selective investment over diversification? Can institutional investors break from the diversification strategy without being seen as picking winners, anti-competitive, or gambling with the money? More fundamentally, how do you take a system which operates on 0% information and transform it into something that has at least 1% or 2% information?
Anyway, I don't expect you to answer those questions. Thanks for the food for thought.
Though I'm somewhat familiar with arguments concerningcorporate ownership and proxy votes, see e.g., https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/07/16/conflicted-mutual...
At the same time, some of the most effective shareholder activism has come precisely from pooled investors, notably CalPERS and TIAA-CREF. See e.g., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=890321
There are numerous other issues in corporate governance, ranging from the disastrous policy of "shareholder value" to vampirous corpprate raiders, to concentration and cross interests among boards of directors, to cross-ownership cartels as with South Korea's chaebol and Japan's keiretsu.
A small part of the problem, possibly, but not the principle cause.