Big Tech Has Helped Trash America
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Luckily Bitcoin improved on gold as a store of value, so while many are angry, people who understand that having hard money is the most important in current times have an easy life right now.
Kara has been pretty vocal during the last few years on her opinion of social media allowing Trump to spread disinformation and try to incite violence. It took inciting an attempted coup and a couple of people dying before they did the right thing. Her opinion seems to be that they shouldn't have let it get that far, seeing as the writing has been on the wall for a long time.
Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, 1995.
I’ve had this quote in mind at many points this year. The refusal to wear masks, the inability to agree on basic facts, the wildfire spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.
IMHO the only way out of this hole is by doubling down on critical thinking education. Education that focuses not just on skills for a labor market, but skills for thinking. Being able to separate fact from fiction, ‘feels from reals’.
An aside: I’ve often felt that writing longhand on paper produces a different result than typing. Something about the deliberate pace. Technology has given us awesome powers, and the ability to blast out our stream of consciousness at hyper speed. We would do well to slow down a little, reflect more, try to fully grasp issues and consider the sources and validity of things before we share them out.
But above all, we need to find our way back to truth through science - not just what feels good, but what we can sort out through the full power of our mental abilities.
Because that has been the most disruptive conspiracy of this century so far.
Instead if you look closely at his library you will find plenty of titles by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Bill Bennett, and on and on. It’s a small percentage of what he reads, but it’s how he gets his ideology and has been for 20+ years.
The cognitive biases that allow people to fall into these warped worldviews is shared by all of humanity. It could just as easily have been any of us under different circumstances.
1) Writing to appease Google rather than readers. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxLKUM0FlCw) (http://experiment.cjr.org/experiment/features/the-evolution-...)
2) Producing video to appease Facebook. (https://digiday.com/media/the-new-york-times-facebook-live/) (https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/facebook-live-new-york-times....)
3) Have everyone tweet to appease Twitter. (https://www.niemanlab.org/2015/01/dont-try-too-hard-to-pleas...) and how it is going (https://twitter.com/nyttypos).
Ms. Swisher is one of the tech pundits I always read.watch when she interviews someone. Perhaps she can do this with the new administration and find out why we allow the failed social media experiments to continue.
The notion of misinformation being enabled by "Big Tech" is subtly but unintentionally leaking information.
There are two logical possibilities when mass communication platforms (old or new flavors) in unison raise the specter of "contagious information" that affects deplorable heads:
1 - Mass media owners have been, since the very beginning of mass communication, aware of a curious fact not really understood by the rest of us: ideas and thoughts conveyed via mass communication are unthinkly accepted and internalized by large subset of society. (The birth of modern advertising occurs around the same time.)
2 - Simply having substantial control of mass communication is not enough if establishment views, and version of news, are countered by alternative views and news, in context of a political class that no longer enjoys public confidence.
Madison avenue pretty much is built on #1. Collapse of USSR, itself a master of #1 technologies, could not be prevented by mere state propaganda (#2).
During the entirety of Cold War, no one jammed Soviet and setellite propaganda (such as Radio Moscow). At the same time, Soviets would jam the signal of Western mass communication organs (such as BBC).
In the 90s, the political class in this country caved to capital class and previously illegal consolidations of media, finance, and banking were made permissible again. The degredation in the quality of journalism (and even cultural products) visibly began at that point (if you were paying attention).
Now, having bet on #1 effects during 20 years of entirely questionable (and in times illegal) behavior by the entire political class of US -- 9/11, Iraq wars, and the collapse of the financial sector in '08, and role of the "journalism" in covering these events -- in a political environment that gradually brought us to American 'Pravda' moments, #2 phenomena raised its ugly head. Alt-news was a reaction to bullshit-news of American "journalism". (Hi "Judtih"! ...). It is also quite necessary to point out that many of these mushrooms of American night spewing strange theories smell like intelligence service cointelpro.
We need to reimpose the pre-90s restrictions on consolidations in Banking, Finance, and Media and reinstate the regulatory 'firewalls' that protected the integrity of American political system prior to 90s. A regulatory regime that saw the West face world-class propaganda by Soviets with aplumb and broadcasted the demise of that source of "misinformation" to a world wide audiance, without ever having to resort to ham fisted censorship (with possible exception of the 'red scare' period and it's version of 'cancel culture').
Cyberspace in the 90s was wide open prairie, a place to settle and built new cultures and civilizations. I was too young to realize that nothing starts from scratch; just like the pioneers that fled poverty and persecution to colonize the prairie, we built cyberspace on the culture we believed in: free market, free speech, growth above all. American libertarian in other words.
The descendants of the French or Russian revolutions will happily tell you that that shit don't work. After you've settled that wide open prairie, you need to lay down rules and regulations, a polity. And what we (collectively) have found out that this ends up meaning well-regulated markets and well-regulated speech, enforced by democratically elected (and audited) authorities. Liberal democracies in other words, with bureaucracies and police and courts, not John Galt.
So, 'no' to the TFA, we shouldn't restart Tech. We should evolve it, past the Pioneer stage into a proper polity and civilization. Regulate Big Tech, control it. We already have paradigms of what we consider appropriate: we can tell our friends whatever we want (free speech in private communication) but we cannot go on TV or on a newspaper and libel because those media have liability. Why should a tweet that 20 people read have the same restrictions as a tweet to 20M? why can't we pick reasonable rules that police the latter? escalated liability based on reach that Twitter (for example) would be liable for?
Will that kill the margins of Twitter and YouTube and Facebook? absolutely, but so what? They are monopolies at a massive scale that our society is already dependent on, like we are on TV, or newspapers or the power grid. They can be fat and rich, just not more powerful than all news publishers in the history of humanity. Combined.
Big tech -- and big pharma, and all the other bigs -- are built to be optimized with a system of shareholder value. They weren't built to optimize for civic engagement and thoughtful dialog.
If we want the second -- some of it anyway -- we have to be prepared to give up -- through regulation and governance and then through behavior -- some of the first.
Not to detract from your core point, but also old enough for the memory of NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator to have merged, it seems. Been happening to me too lately.
Millions of man hours dedicated to solving amazing technical problems which allow greater access to information than ever before in human history, and these useless idiots use it to spread lies, disinformation and foment insurrection.
We require licenses for operating machinery like cars, and I truly, honestly, and without hyperbole think it's time we do the same for information technology. Spreading misinformation and disinformation has cost the U.S. nearly 400,000 lives and counting. That's worse than the number of car deaths by an order of magnitude. Time for us to act accordingly.
Kara wants to blame Big Tech, but I don't. I blame the jerks who abuse and misuse the tech for personal gain, and the idiots who are their willing followers. I loathe Facebook, but it wasn't Zuckerberg inciting people to insurrection.
Big tech has been restrained, all things considered. Think about it. Can you imagine if the head of, say, Microsoft, Apple or Google was as mentally ill as Trump? Serious, serious damage could result.
You want to drive a car? You go take a test that shows you understand the law, and respect others on the road. You want to use a smartphone to share news about politics? You should have to take a test that shows you understand the law and respect others as well.
I'm going to have to say, that's about as respectful as one can get on this topic without ignoring reality. Unless you think the rioters were "wonderful and intelligent" and that the president's obvious sociopathic narcissism isn't a sign of severe mental illness.
These people are citizens too, and if you got to know each other, you would probably find you are not so different. Might disagree on some topics.
So I find your post utterly disrespectful. But you are a citizen too, and have every right to hold your opinions.
In the end the proof is in the pudding ( elections ).
That's a wildly more anti-freedom stance than anything even the big social media companies have done. At least they are just private companies exercising their right to control what goes on on their own platform, you're actually advocating for the modern equivalent of requiring all typewriters to be registered.
No one tells you where you can drive once you get your driver's license, we just don't allow incompetent people behind the wheel. No one at the DMV checks to see which party you belong to before giving you a license.
Same thing for an "infotech license". Once someone has demonstrated basic critical thinking, and an understanding of the law, they can say whatever they want to.
There are far more examples of not blaming the maker for the use - microphones, TVs, hypodermic needles, cars, etc. Why do we make an exception for one kind of tech? There are answers that are worth discussing and which might inform our responses, but Swisher doesn't even try to make one and nor do most who just rush to "solutions" that won't actually work.
Users create the problematic content. They were creating it before "big tech" and will quite likely continue creating it even if they're disallowed from using "big tech" products and services. What is achieved, for example, by moving Donald Trump's content from Twitter to trumpmaga.com where there's no moderation or terms of service to enforce? Would his reach really be reduced that much, at this point? We'd just get to have the same debate about whether his host or DNS provider or CDN should deplatform him, with even dimmer prospects of an affirmative answer.
I'm not saying tech companies are blameless, by any means, but let's blame them for things they themselves do and not for the mere presence of users who create problematic content. That lets the kinds of people who organized the January 6 insurrection attempt off the hook too much, along with many other kinds of miscreants. Going only after the platform providers seems a bit too much like looking for the keys under the lamp-post.