PG will note that TPV is not and has not been a political blog. PG would like to keep it that way.
PG understands that everything is supposed to be political, etc., but he believes such sentiments are, of themselves, political, and he manages to do a lot of things and have many satisfactory online and offline interactions with others that are simply not political.
While the growth of the internet and the many different ways of accessing it have produced many benefits for humanity, those benefits have been accompanied by some detriments. In PG’s unpresuming opinion, one of the largest is the internet’s ability to enhance and magnify the concerted actions of crazy people.
While at one time it might have been difficult for a single crazy person to connect with others who are crazy in the same way because of the rarity of that person’s particular variety of craziness, now, the internet allows almost anyone to join an online community of people who are exactly like her/him/etc. Cross-dressing differently-abled Lithuanian-American pediatricians can gather online and magnify their voices to fight the injustice that is part of their lives.
Online, everyone can be part of a hyphenated interest group.
PG’s bloviated opining was intended as a brief introduction to a column in today’s Wall Street Journal written by columnist Peggy Noonan, but it grew. [Trigger Warning: Ms. Noonan is a Republican, but not as Republican as a lot of people on the internet believe she should be.]
I’ll start with a personal experience and then try to expand into Republicans and big tech.
In the spring of 2016, Facebook came under pressure, stemming from leaks by its workers, over charges of systemic political bias. I was not especially interested: a Silicon Valley company that employs thousands of young people to make decisions that are often ideological will tilt left, and conservatives must factor that in, as they’re used to doing.
My concerns about Facebook had to do with its apparently monopolistic nature, slippery ethics and algorithmic threats to serious journalism.
Soon after, I received an email from Mark Zuckerberg’s office inviting me and other “conservative activists” to attend a meeting with him to discuss the bias charges in an off-the-record conversation. I responded that I was not an activist but a columnist, for the Journal, and would be happy to attend in that capacity and on the record. That didn’t go over too well with Mr. Zuckerberg’s office! I was swiftly told that wouldn’t do.
What I most remember is that they didn’t mention where his office is. There was an air of being summoned by the prince. You know where the prince lives. In the castle. Who doesn’t know exactly where Facebook is?
In February 2018 Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein of Wired wrote a deeply reported piece that mentioned the 2016 meeting. It was called so that the company could “make a show of apologizing for its sins.” A Facebook employee who helped plan it said part of its goal—they are clever at Facebook and knew their mark!—was to get the conservatives fighting with each other. “They made sure to have libertarians who wouldn’t want to regulate the platform and partisans who would.” Another goal was to leave attendees “bored to death” by a technical presentation after Mr. Zuckerberg spoke.
. . . .
I forgot about it until last summer, when Mr. Zuckerberg’s office wrote again. His problems were mounting. I was invited now, with an unspecified group of others, to “an off the record discussion over dinner at his home in Palo Alto.” They used that greasy greaseball language Silicon Valley uses: Mr. Zuckerberg is “focused on protecting” users and thinking about “the future and how best to serve the Facebook community.”
I ignored the invitation. They pressed. Their last note reached me at an irritated moment, so I wrote back a rocket, reminding him of the previous meeting and how it had been revealed to be a mischievous and highly political enacting of faux remorse. I suggested that though it was an honor to be asked to cross a continent for the privilege of giving him my time, thought and advice, I would not. I added that I was sorry to say he strikes me in his public, and now semiprivate, presentations as an imperious twerp.
For a second I actually hesitated: The imperious twerp runs the algorithms, controls the traffic, has all the dark powers! But I am an American, and one with her Irish up, so I hit send.
And I’m still here, at least at the moment, so I guess that’s OK.
. . . .
I once wrote the signal fact of Mr. Zuckerberg’s career is that he is supremely gifted in one area—monetizing technical ingenuity by marrying it to a canny sense of human weakness.
None of this is news. We just can’t manage to do anything about it.
. . . .
The New York Times this week had a breakthrough report . . . on how the tech giants are fighting back. They are “amassing an army of lobbyists.” Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple spent a combined $55 million in lobbying last year, about double what they spent in 2016. They “have intensified their efforts to lure lobbyists with strong connections to the White House, the regulatory agencies, and Republicans and Democrats in Congress.” Facebook hired Mrs. Pelosi’s former chief of staff. The speaker herself has received major campaign money from employees and political-action committees of all the tech giants.
. . . .
But the mood in America is anti-big-tech. Everyone knows they’re too powerful, too arrogant, loom too large in public life.
And something else: This whole new world of new technology was born in the 1970s and ’80s. We still think it’s new and we’re figuring it out, but we’re almost half a century into it and we can see what works and what doesn’t, what’s had good effects and hasn’t. It is time to move.
. . . .
Here’s what [Washington politicians] should be thinking: Break them up. Break them in two, in three; regulate them. Declare them to be what they’ve so successfully become: once a pleasure, now a utility.
It all depends on Congress, which has been too stupid to move in the past and is too stupid to move competently now. That’s what’s slowed those of us who want reform, knowing how badly they’d do it.
Yet now I find myself thinking: I don’t care. Do it incompetently, but do something.
. . . .
The Times quoted Republican Sen. Josh Hawley as saying “the dominance of big tech” is a “big problem.” They “may be more socially powerful than the trusts of the Roosevelt era, and yet they still operate like a black box.”
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)
PG knows some indie authors have had good results from their social media book promotions and he applauds their skill, creativity and generosity for sharing their best online practices with other authors. In such cases, PG’s impression is that the authors are using the social media platforms rather than the other way around. Readers benefit by receiving information they would like to receive about books written by some of their favorite authors.
PG is probably some sort of social media snob, but he rarely uses social media to receive any information. (Because Crazy People) However, he’s a compulsive early adopter, so in days past, when he heard about a new social media platform, he signed up and checked it out. After 3-4 visits, he usually was bored by the content and quit checking in. (As a result, he has some four and five character social media user IDs that might be valuable if he could sell them.)
These days, PG uses social media strictly as an outbound communication device to provide information he thinks might be beneficial to people who like to receive information via this channel. To this end, he has a plug-in for TPV that automatically produces a row of colorful little icons below each post that should make it easy for any visitor to repost/forward any of the TPV posts to their own social media accounts and is happy to have anyone use them to do so. To avoid charges of false altruism, PG is also happy if some of these reposts result in more visitors to TPV.
Of all the major social media platforms, PG formerly signed on to Facebook the most frequently (1-2 times per month) to keep up with a handful of old friends/relatives who would occasionally post news and photos there. However, for the reasons Ms. Noonan describes – Facebook’s breaching of privacy and ethical boundaries – PG closed his account several months ago.
Interesting solution: https://humanevents.com/2019/05/03/platform-access-is-a-civil-right/
These days every middle class perk is allegedly a human right.
The latest claim is home ownership.
In time, there will come lawsuits with plaintiffs claiming Facebook is a public forum, not a private website. Somewhere, someday, one of these plaintiffs will sucker Zucker and win, and Facebonk’s censorship mechanism will come a-tumbling down. What will happen to Facebook after that? Only the Shadow knows.
It becomes Usenet with pictures and ads.
Facebook might even see it as a plus.
A lot of Facebook’s problems are from trying to control it; going the opposite direction would free it to sell targeted ads without responsibility for moderating content. Freefire zone Facebook might be even more profitable. 😀
Felix, Yours is as good a guess as any. You think Zucker would stay for the money? Or is control more important to him such that he would pour, pick up his toys, and go home?
Don’t know him as a person but the portrayals of him seem to suggest money is very important to him, unlike most of the real tech industry billionaires, to whom it’s a way of keeping score or who have moved on from caring about it.
To some, like Musk, apparently, it’s a means to bigger ends. If he succeeds in his grandiose long term plans he’ll have bootstrapped his way deep into the history books via: ZIP2 to Paypal to SpaceX/Tesla to Starlink to Mar. All successes, each bigger than the predecesor. He might have a better story than even Tony Stark.
Zuckerberg hasn’t been involved in anything other than milking Facebook, has he? Gates, Allen, Buffet, Bezos, Page, they all have/had other interests and projects. From the outside…
Felix,
I have always thought of Musk as more like D D Harriman.
He’s a good part huckster, like Harriman.
But Harriman never made it to Luna, if I recall. Don’t think anybody will stop Musk if the rocket works.
Heinlein did get one thing right: politicians and the blind masses forgetting about space, leaving it to the business types to go to the moon to stay.
Harriman did make it to the Moon: Requiem.
I mean I don’t like what the big tech companies are doing, but I also don’t think they should be treated as utilities.
Water is a utility today, you need it to survive and electricity is as well these days but do you need Facebook and Google to survive?
Certainly, they would like us to think that we do, but there are alternatives and it’s a shame that people who are displeased with Facebook haven’t invested in creating their own social media sites I would use another site not Facebook though.
I like the sly dig at libertarians, and I feel that any precedent to break up a company based on political views of its founders or employees could backfire somewhat in the future.
They seem to me to be common carriers. The law protects them from responsibility for the opinions that they convey, so in my view they should not be allowed to refuse service to anyone on the basis of disagreeing with those opinions.
The problem lies with them claiming one thing while being something else. Common carriers like the phone company of old didn’t control what went over their wires, anything that can edit/block the connection is then not really a common carrier.
And if they can edit/block then there’s nothing stopping a country/state/community from then enacting laws telling them what all else they will edit/block to be allowed to service that country/state/community.
MYMV and you have a voice and access when you wish to use it.
Yes, they want to be considered a utility with no responsibility for the content when there are lawsuits about the content, but then want to be considered ‘just a private company’ when they want to control the content.
This goes for ISPs and the Net Neutrality fuss as well.
My answer is to force them to make a choice (say every year or two) and live with the rules and liabilities of the choice.
They can be a utility, with no liability for illegal content and no control over the content[1]
Or they can be a priviate site with full control over the content and who can post, but with liability about whatever they choose to allow
[1] note, they could still tag contents, porn, white nationalist, terrorist, illegal in the US, illegal in China, illegal in the UK, etc and then let the users choose to apply filters blocking content (or block content illegal in one country from users in that country), but the tagging should be known so that if they start tagging all republicans as white nationalist or all muslims as terrorists, people can notice and challenge the classification.
Noonan is a fairly savvy lady with a long history of political speechwriting but she’s a bit off base with Facebook, as is everybody who thinks Facebook is a tech company. It isn’t. Facebook is an advertising company.
They use a lot of technology but none of their money comes from selling tech, much less creating it.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-tech-giants-make-billions/
Even Google is primarily an ad company, for all of the money they’ve thrown at developing software and hardware. Their biggest success, Android, was purchased and it came with so much baggage they’ve hardly made any net on it.
Follow the money, folks.
Then you’ll know how to hurt them and what they’ll protect to the death.
They use a lot of technology but none of their money comes from selling tech, much less creating it.
They trade tech for the raw material they package and sell. If FB didn’t give them the tech, they wouldn’t get the raw material.
It’s funny about Peggy Noonan. She seems to be a level headed & intelligent person whose worldview is pretty compatible with my own, but somehow your phrase – “off base” – captures my general reaction to her opinions.
There was a rumor in 1867 that a “colored” club was going to apply for admission to the upcoming annual convention of the National Association of Base Ball Players. Here is the reaction from veteran reporter Henry Chadwick, writing in the New York Sunday Mercury of November 10, 1867:
“We wish to exclude every question from discussion in the Convention that in any way has a political complexion, and for this reason we shall oppose any such recognition as the one above alluded to. Let the subject be one excluded from the Convention entirely in any shape or form, and if the two Committees–Nominating and Committee of Rules–avoid it, it cannot legally come up in the Convention for discussion.”
When people say they aren’t being political, they actually are accepting the status quo, which is a political act. This isn’t something you can opt out from.
God Bless the Status Quo, for it’s so much more interesting than pretending to care.
I’m just began taking Mark Dawson’s Ads for Authors course. I’d been doing book ads on Amazon. After watching Mark’s 90 minute video on Facebook ads and how you can find select groups to target for ads, I’ll state that FB’s ability to monetize data that people have posted on FB is astoundingly complex and Amazon, by comparison, seems like an amateur.
There are crazy people everywhere, not just on social media. Unlike in ‘real life’, social media has things called ‘block’ and ‘mute’ when you encounter the ‘crazy people’. There are also highly intelligent and knowledgeable people there, far more than can be found in any one particular locality and social circle who can and will link you to information and articles that are easy to miss otherwise. Many of them will also exchange tweets with you and even debate. A discussion I had with Mike Godwin of Godwin’s Law more than a year ago still gets re-tweets and that is someone I would have never met or had the chance to talk with anywhere else.
So there is more than one way to look at it.
(Facebook I must admit I loath)
All good points, JR.
The only social media I do is Twitter, largely because my sons are on it. Other than that, I’ve depoliticized my account by not following anyone just because of politics. There has to be a primary reason for following that relates to something else.
I have one friend who retweets or likes a lot of political stuff & I found that despite myself I would get drawn into some of the threads he surfaces.
I avoid the crazies by using the Scott Adams Rule – block trolls immediately & without discussion. I don’t reply to anything that is adversarial in nature or provoking or just plain wrong unless it includes reasoned content that in some fashion advances what passes for a discussion & I try to make my tweets the same.
But I DO respond if I feel the impulse to engage – either by blocking the offender, or muting him. (And it’s usually a him, as far as I can tell,) What I have found is that my impulse to reply is satisfied by blocking/muting. So before I reply I consider blocking/muting, & usually I get my dopamine hit & leave it at that.
I also block anyone who uses obscenities casually. Ruins profanity for the rest of us. Sort of like the now seemingly obligatory standing ovation ruins our ability to recognize & reward a really terrific performance at the symphony.
You make some good points. I absolutely agree with following the Scott Adams Rule on trolls.