GAFA FANG

disambig see Big 4

1 25 see broliarchy

primary 619 on cryptocurrency

merri ok

see silicon valley

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PCO

A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from deporting a British man who was recently placed on a visa ban after U.S. officials accused him and four other Europeans of online censorship.

Center for Countering Digital Hate CEO Imran Ahmed filed a complaint Thursday against Secretary of State Marco Rubioand Attorney General Pam Bondito prevent “the imminent prospect of unconstitutional arrest,” the lawsuit reads.

“The government’s actions are the latest in a string of escalating and unjustifiable assaults on the First Amendment and other rights, one that cannot stand basic legal scrutiny,” it continues. “Simply put, immigration enforcement—here, immigration detention and threatened deportation — may not be used as a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express views disfavored by the current administration.”

The suit adds that Ahmed is a lawful permanent resident with a wife and son who are U.S. citizens.

The complaint cites other recent cases where foreign nationals on student visas, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, were stripped of their documentation and faced with deportation as “part of a larger pattern of attempted repression of constitutionally protected speech.”

“The government has no power to punish Mr. Ahmed for his research, protected speech, and advocacy, and Defendants cannot evade those constitutional limitations by simply claiming that Mr. Ahmed’s presence or activities have ‘potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,'” the suit reads.

The administration placed the visa ban on Ahmed, along with French former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton, Global Disinformation Index CEO Clare Melford and HateAid leaders Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, on Tuesday.

By signing up, I agree to the Terms of Use, have reviewed the Privacy Policy, and to receive personalized offers and communications via email, on-site notifications, and targeted advertising using my email address from The Hill, Nexstar Media Inc., and its affiliates

Breton backed the EU’s Digital Services Act, which compelled online platforms to tackle hate speech and misinformation and remove it from their pages. U.S. officials claim the law unfairly targets American tech companies and citizens, Reuters reported.

On Tuesday, Rubio accused the five of leading “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose.”

“Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States,” Rubio posted on social media. “We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”

Undersecretary of State Sarah Rogers shared Rubio’s message and warned that “if you spend your career fomenting censorship of American speech, you’re unwelcome on American soil.”

Breton criticized his visa ban, asking in an X post if “[former. Sen. Joe] McCarthy’s witch hunt” was back.

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Click. Scroll. Surrender. Tim Wu Warns Against The Rise of Big Data in 'The Age of Extraction' | KQED

Our digital lives are increasingly dominated by a handful of powerful tech platforms. Once promising prosperity and democracy, the internet has instead allowed companies like Google, Amazon and Meta to extract money, data and attention from users on an unparalleled scale. Tim Wu, a former technology advisor to President Biden, argues that the government is failing us while tech monopolies deepen wealth divides and enable authoritarianism. We talk to him about how we can take back power from Big Tech. Wu’s new book is “The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.”

Guests:

Tim Wu,professor of law, Columbia Law School

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an 1 25

In his farewell address, outgoing US President Joe Biden warned “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy”.

The comment suggests that, under Donald Trump’s second term as president, it will be billionaires rather than the people who shape public policy.

There is certainly some evidence Biden’s ominous caution should be taken seriously. The world’s richest man and the owner of X, Elon Musk, has been a vocal supporter of the Republican candidate. Other billionaire tech moguls to visit Trump at his Mar-a-Lago mansion after his 2024 election victory include Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Google chief executive Sundar Pichai.

There is nothing unusual about business leaders wanting the ear of an incoming president. What has concerned Biden and others is that so many of Trump’s influential backers also own media platforms and have the ability to sway public opinion.

Should these new tech titans be thought of as oligarchs?

What is an oligarchy?

Like many of the academic and scientific categories we still use today, oligarchy was originally defined by the Greek philosopher Aristotle.

In The Politics, he argued people are “political animals”, social by nature, and instinctively want to live in a community. He studied different governments of the ancient world and concluded there were six essential types.

A state could be ruled by a single leader, a small group of elites, or through mass participation of the people. If the leadership acted in the common advantage (koinê sumpheron), he termed these constitutions to be monarchy, aristocracy or polity, respectively.

If the constitutions became corrupt and the leadership acted only to advance their own self-interest, he labelled them tyranny, oligarchy and democracy.

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So for Aristotle, an oligarchy is a corrupt form of government. It is when power is in the hands of a small group of elites who advance their own interests rather than the common good.

In Aristotelian terms, democracy is also a corrupt form of government in which the majority uses its power to abuse minorities. While the term democracy has been rehabilitated and is usually seen as a positive, the word oligarchy has retained its negative connotations.

When the United States was created, the founding fathers looked back to Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero and other ancient thinkers to try and create the best kind of constitution.

Following the Aristotelian tradition, they tried to design a mixed constitution where neither the one, the few nor the many could dominate the others. The president has great power. But their power is kept in check by Congress and the judiciary, which is in turn kept in check by the media and, ultimately, the people through regular elections.

Modern oligarchies

In modern politics, the term oligarch is most often used in a Russian context. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, opportunistic tycoons made enormous fortunes from buying up state assets such as energy companies and financial institutions, which also brought them significant political influence as a result.

Since Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, however, Russia has become increasingly authoritarian. While there is still an oligarchic class, their power has been reined in. They must not challenge Putin’s power or vision for the state.

Although China is ostensibly a communist state, the Gini index (the measure of social inequality) has blown out in recent years as a small group of elites become increasingly wealthy.

Despite the state’s official commitment to socialist principles, political scientist Ming Xia has argued China is now transitioning into a modern oligarchy.

What about the United States and Australia?

Despite Biden’s warning of a potential oligarchy, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page argued back in 2014 the US already was one.

The US has the essential features of a liberal democracy (fair and regular elections, freedom of speech, and an independent press). But Gilens and Page worried large businesses and a small group of affluent citizens had a disproportionate influence on policy.

In Australia also, it could be argued an oligarchy is either emerging or has already taken hold.

Australia has a similar-sized economy to Russia and a growing list of billionaires who appear to have significant influence over government policy.

The power of the Murdoch family and their media empire is well-documented. We have also seen increased political activity from other billionaires including Gina Rinehart, Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer – who went as far as to start his own political party.

There is no question billionaires in the US and Australia have enormous power and influence. But that in itself does not make an oligarchy.

In Aristotelian terms, the defining feature of an oligarchy is the ruling elite blatantly use their status for their own personal gain rather than the public good.

This is a moral judgement, and one that is increasingly hard to make when so many of the ultra-wealthy own traditional news media and social media platforms that can shape public opinion.

Nevertheless, any shift towards oligarchy should be a cause of alarm to all who value the long democratic tradition in both the US and Australia.

Whether it is a symptom of Trumpism, as Biden suggests, or part of a longer trend, strengthening our democratic institutions and curtailing the disinformation and misinformation that are all too prevalent on social media, is part of the solution.

Benjamin T. Jones, Senior Lecturer in History, CQUniversity Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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3 24

cory doc new bk tech monopoly

*The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

UpFront - March 7, 2024 | KPFA

text interview

MSN

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mebbe better soc med big tech?

an 6 24

In a majority decision, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett slapped down the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in a decision Wednesday.

Red states and conservatives sued President Joe Biden's administration for coordinating with social media companies to help tamp down misinformation about the pandemic in 2021.

According to the Supreme Court majority in the *Murthy v. Missouri* case, the parties didn't have standing to sue.

It reverses the conservative Fifth Circuit, which said communications between governmental officials and social media platforms meant that the government officials were regulating content-moderation decisions for the platform.

"The Fifth Circuit was wrong to do so," wrote Barrett.

According to SCOTUS Blog reporter Amy Howe, "The challengers contend that the restrictions that they experienced in the past on social media platforms could be attributed to the defendants and that the platforms will continue to censor their speech."

The Supreme Court rejected the idea, writing that the "platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgment. To be sure, the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms' moderation choices. But the Fifth Circuit, by attributing every platform decision at least in part to the defendants, glossed over complexities in the evidence."

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an 6 23

no lnx

canada’s Parliament recently passed Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which would require social media platforms to pay news organizations for posted articles. In response, Meta announced that it was going to ban article sharing in Canada rather than pay up.

The Online News Act received Royal Assent on Thursday, meaning it’s all set to become law after Parliament passed it. The law is expected to go into effect in six months. The Canadian government says that the bill asks social media companies to “bargain fairly with Canadian news businesses” for having their articles posted.

“[The Online News Act] levels the playing field by putting the power of big tech in check and ensuring that even our smallest news business can benefit through this regime and receive fair compensation for their work,” Pablo Rodriguez, Minister of Canadian Heritage, said in a statement.

READ MORE: Facebook’s Zuckerberg Won’t Ban Holocaust Deniers Because He Thinks They Don’t ‘Intentionally’ Get Facts Wrong

The government says social media outlets are getting a clear benefit from users sharing articles. The companies not only sell advertising that appears near the articles, but sharing stories also boosts engagement and the value of the platform to users. In addition, the platforms can find out more about their users based on the type of stories they click on, obtaining their data for targeted advertising. With the Online News Act,smaller outlets are allowed the opportunity for collective bargaining with the tech giants.

Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, responded by saying Canadian news stories wouldn’t be available to Canadians on its platforms.

“The changes affecting news content will not otherwise impact Meta’s products and services in Canada. We want to assure the millions of Canadians on our platforms that they will always be able to connect with friends and family, grow their businesses and support their local communities,” Meta said in a statement.

Meta threatened to do this earlier this month, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau panned the company, according to the CBC.

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“The fact that these internet giants would rather cut off Canadians’ access to local news than pay their fair share is a real problem, and now they’re resorting to bullying tactics to try and get their way. It’s not going to work,” Trudeau said.

Meta is not the only outlet to consider such a drastic action. Google has suggested on Thursday it may do something similar, the CBC reported.

“Every step of the way, we’ve proposed thoughtful and pragmatic solutions that would have improved the bill and cleared the path for us to increase our already significant investments in the Canadian news ecosystem,” Google said. “So far, none of our concerns have been addressed. Bill C-18 is about to become law and remains unworkable.”

Canada’s Online News Act is not the first of its kind. It’s based on a 2021 Australian law, the News Media Bargaining Code. Nor is Meta’s response the first of its kind—in August 2020, when the NMBC was proposed, the company blocked news in Australia. In early 2021, Facebook reached an agreement with the Australian government and removed the block.

A similar act could even come to America. California is reportedly considering its own version of the Online News Act, according to The Hill. And, as the Hill reports, Meta has made similar threats to the state if the Journalism Preservation Act goes forward.

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https://theintercept.com/2022/10/01/roe-amazon-google-facebook-independent-womens-forum/

WHEN THE Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the country’s top internet companies quickly responded with commitments to help employees in states that moved to ban abortion. In an implicit signal of support for abortion rights, the companies said they would help those employees seek abortions in states where the procedure remains legal.

In the years leading up to the seismic reproductive rights decision, however, the tech giants sponsored a controversial group that’s worked tirelessly to put the Supreme Court under conservative control, setting the stage for Roe’s reversal.

The Independent Women’s Forum traces its origins back to the 1991 fight to confirm the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas. Since then, the group has expanded into promoting a litany of perennial right-wing causes like climate denial, immigration alarmism, and deregulation, but a conservative-dominated Supreme Court remained a focus.

public relations plays a key role in its operation. With savvy self-branding as a pro-woman organization, the group fought for the appointment of conservative justices to the Supreme Court. The IWF couched support for Brett Kavanaugh as good feminism and any opposition to Amy Coney Barrett as sexism — despite well-founded concerns that their ascensions to the court would spell the end of Roe. The IWF wields a skillful mix of media placement, op-eds, television punditry, and other contributions to the conservative content ecosystem.

The group also takes advantage of quieter influence peddling as well. In 2020, IWF chief and Vicks VapoRub heiress Heather Higgins boasted to a closed audience of Virginia conservatives about how instrumental the group was in rallying congressional support for Kavanaugh’s nomination. Higgins told the group that the IWF circulated a confidential strategy memo on the Hill. “Most important,” Higgins said, “Susan Collins told me that without that memo, she would not see how to support him,” referring to the Republican senator from Maine.

The Dark Money-Funded Women’s Group Rallying Behind Amy Coney Barrett

Independent Women’s Forum and its sister organization, Independent Women’s Voice, draw on donations from right-wing financial mainstays like the Koch brothers, but in recent years the groups have enjoyed financial support from Facebook’s parent company, Meta; Google; and Amazon. In 2017, Google sponsored an IWF gala at the “gold” donor level, according to brochures provided to The Intercept by True North Research, a progressive watchdog group. Other brochures show that Meta (which at the time still using the name Facebook) sponsored IWF galas in 2018, alongside Google, and 2019. Honorees at IWF events have included notable anti-abortion figures like Rep. Lynne Cheney, R-Wy.; top Trump administration official Kellyanne Conway; and Vice President Mike Pence.

Corporate disclosures from Amazon show that the company donated undisclosed sums to the IWF in 2018, 2019, and 2020.

Amazon, Google, Meta, and the IWF did not respond to a request for comment.

True North founder Lisa Graves characterized the IWF’s efforts as an attempt to launder conservative ideology. “They act as a distaff,” she said in an interview, “in essence providing a woman’s face for the right wing’s critique or attack on progressives and its advance of this extreme and regressive, repressive agenda.”

DESPITE THE PUBLIC perception of Silicon Valley’s alignment with progressive values and liberal causes, tech companies, particularly those fearing state regulation, have long funneled money to right-wing groups like the IWF. At the same time, the IWF routinely pushes policy positions that are highly favorable to its corporate donors.

The IWF has consistently espoused tech industry-friendly positions on labor, antitrust, and other issues, without disclosing its donors’ interests. Take, for example, an April IWF blog post that warned that antitrust enforcement against Big Tech would prove disastrous. “Tech innovation has been nothing short of miraculous over the past few decades,” wrote Patrice Onwuka,director of IWF’s Center for Economic Opportunity and its go-to defender of powerful tech firms.

Read Our Complete CoverageThe End of Roe

Few issues in tech have galvanized the IWF and Onwuka like the bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would block tech companies from leveraging their enormous reach to favor their own services over competitors. In a December 2021 piece titled “Amazon Prime may not be around to save the day next Christmas,” Onwuka claimed, “Senator Amy Klobuchar and others are on a path to end services like Prime’s fast and free shipping and other services that we depend upon.” Onwuka then linked to a blog post by the Amazon-funded Chamber of Progress that claimed, dubiously, that the law would “ban Amazon Prime.”

In June, Onwuka wrote a jeremiad against congressional antitrust efforts:“The conveniences that make life and work easier and faster and save consumers money may disappear.” Later that day, Onwuka appeared on Fox Business, again protesting antitrust enforcement against the tech industry. “I’m more worried about the impact on small business owners and on women and families that rely on some of the benefits that some of these big four tech companies provide,” she said.

While shielding Big Tech from antitrust scrutiny has proven a priority for the IWF, the group also stands up directly for its benefactors. In 2019, Onwuka wrote an entire post dedicated sticking up for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after Politico reported that he had attended dinners with notable conservative commentators and lawmakers. “Zuckerberg is a private citizen who can eat dinner with whomever he wants,” Onwuka wrote. “His dinner has a clear business purpose and that’s part of doing business.”

“Institutionally they have no position on abortion, that’s their stated position. But organizationally, they have backed the most aggressive anti-choice slate of judges we’ve ever seen.”

The cordial treatment of industry giants is of course a linchpin of conservatism, and the IWF would almost certainly be warning that antitrust will bring us back to the Bronze Age even without Google sponsoring its gala dinners. But fueling the right-wing punditry mill is a large, ever-expanding facet of Big Tech’s political strategy.

While there’s no evidence that Zuckerberg or Google CEO Sundar Pichai have any personal opposition to abortion access, their companies no doubt benefit from their support of a broad, thriving conservative discourse ecosystem in which any government regulation is anathema. For tech company leadership, the reality that this ecosystem pushes not just Facebook-friendly laissez-faire economics, but also climate denial and abortion bans is considered a perhaps unfortunate but worthwhile byproduct.

Silicon Valley’s patronage of right-wing think tanks and campaigns is an arrangement in which there is ample plausible deniability to go around. When The Guardian reported in 2019 that Google was donating to some of the nation’s most notorious climate-denial organizations, a company spokesperson retorted, “We’re hardly alone among companies that contribute to organizations while strongly disagreeing with them on climate policy.”

The multitude of topics on which the IWF engages, and its careful avoidance of publicly opposing abortion access have helped it avoid a reputation as an anti-abortion group. “Institutionally they have no position on abortion, that’s their stated position,” explained Graves, of True North. “But organizationally, they have backed the most aggressive anti-choice slate of judges we’ve ever seen.”

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an 10 22

It turns out that many of today’s billionaires are selfish, lonely men fantasizing about how they will survive the end times they have played a part in creating.

In mid-September, for just a few days, Indian industrialist Gautam Adani entered the ranks of the top three richest people on earth as per Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. It was the first time an Indian, or, for that matter, an Asian, had enjoyed such a distinction. South Asians in my circle of family and friends felt excited at the prospect that a man who looked like us had entered such rarefied ranks.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Adani was deemed the second richest person, even richer than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos! A Times of India profile fawningly quoted him relaying his thought process in the early days of his rags-to-riches story. “‘Dreams were infinite but finances finite,’ he says with engaging frankness,” according to the profile. There was no mention of the serious accusations he faces of corruption and diverting money into offshore tax havens, or of the entire website, AdaniWatch, devoted to investigating his dirty deeds.

Adani made his money, in part, by investing in digital services, leading one economist to say, “Wherever there is a futuristic business in India, I think… [Adani] has a stronghold.”

The moment of pride that Indians felt in such an achievement by one of their own was short-lived. Quickly Adani slipped from second richest to third richest, and, as of this writing, is in the number four slot on a list dominated by people who have made money from the digital technology revolution.

In fact, ranking multibillionaires is a meaningless exercise that obscures the absurdity of their wealth. This year alone, a number of tech billionaires on Bloomberg’s list lost hundreds of billions of dollars as the gains they made during the early years of the pandemic were wiped out because of a volatile stock market. But, as Whizy Kim of Vox points out, whether or not they’re losing money or giving it away—as Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott has been doing—their wealth remains insanely high, and most are worth more today than before the COVID-19 pandemic.

What are they doing with all this wealth?

It turns out that many are quietly plotting their own survival against our demise. Douglas Rushkoff, podcaster, founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism, and fellow at the Institute for the Future, has written a book about this bizarre phenomenon, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

In an interview, Rushkoff explains that billionaires worry about the end of humanity just like the rest of us. They fear catastrophic climate change or the next pandemic. And, they know their money will likely be of little value when civilizations decline. “How do I maintain control over my Navy Seal security guards once my money is worthless?” is a question that Rushkoff says many of the world’s wealthiest people want to know the answer to.

He knows they ask such questions because he was invited to give private lectures by those who think his expertise in digital technology gives him unique insight into the future. But Rushkoff was quietly studying them instead and has few flattering things to say about these wielders of economic power.

“How is it that the wealthiest and most powerful people I’d ever been in the same room with see themselves as utterly powerless to affect the future?” he asks. It seems as though “the best they can do is prepare for the inevitable calamity and then just, you know, hang on for dear life.”

Rushkoff explores this tech billionaire “mindset” that he says has resulted in a generation of people who are “almost comedic monsters, who really mean to leave us all behind.” Adani is a perfect example of this, having invested in the very fossil fuels that are destroying our planet. He has large holdings in Australia’s coal mining industry and has sparked a massive grassroots movement intent on stopping him.

The admiration that some Indians feel for Adani’s ascension on Bloomberg’s list of billionaires is based on an assumption of cleverness. Surely, he must be one of the smartest people in the world in order to be one of the richest? Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man by far (with twice as much wealth as Bezos), has enjoyed such a reputation for years.

Those who are invested in the idea of merit-based capitalism can justify the unimaginable wealth of the world’s richest people only by assuming they are intelligent enough to deserve it.

This is a façade. Rather than smarts, the wealthiest people on the planet appear to be rather small-minded idiot savants who share a common disdain for the rest of us.

After being around tech billionaires in private, Rushkoff concludes that they are invested in “this notion that they really can, like puppeteers, kind of control society from one level above,” and that this approach is “different than the era of Alexander the Great, or Caesar.” If the question that vexes them most of all is how, in a disastrous future, will they control the guards they hire to protect their hoardings, then our economic system is a farce.

“Even if we call them genius technologists, most of them were plucked from college when they were freshmen,” says Rushkoff. “They came up with some idea in their dorm room before they’d taken history, or economics, or ethics, or philosophy” classes, and so they lack the wisdom needed to oversee their own perverse amounts of wealth.

Having spent time with many tech billionaires, Rushkoff worries that “their education about the future comes from zombie movies and science fiction shows.”

Billionaires are not simply drawing their wealth from a vacuum. According to data from the World Economic Forum, “the world’s richest have captured a disproportionate share of global wealth over recent decades.” This means that, if you were rich to begin with a decade or two ago, you are likely to have seen your wealth multiply by a greater amount than middle-class or lower-income people.

Not only are tech billionaires undeserving of their wealth, but they also are fleecing the rest of us—and fantasizing about hoarding that wealth in the worst-case scenarios while the rest of humanity struggles to survive.

The danger is that if society valorizes such (mostly) men, we are in danger of internalizing their childish, selfish mindset and giving up on solving the climate crisis or building resiliency on a mass scale.

Instead of relating to them, we ought to feel sorry for a group of people so cut off from humanity that their vision of the future is a very lonely one.

“Let’s look at these tech-bro billionaire lunatics. Let’s laugh at what they’re doing… so they look small rather than big,” says Rushkoff. He thinks it is critical to adopt the perspective that “the disaster they’re so afraid of looks entirely manageable by more reasonable people who are willing just to help each other out.”

sonali

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https://kpfa.org/episode/against-the-grain-june-15-2022/

They are among the biggest companies in the world: Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon have an outsized impact on the global economy and on our daily lives. Rob Larson examines the companies that have become synonymous with the glories and ills of contemporary capitalism. He makes the case for online socialism.

Resources:

Rob Larson, Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley Haymarket Books, 2020

odd top 5 corps/monop in same sector, we rely utterly (even more than rr robber baron?

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no lnx grfx

Big Tech Bankrolls the Sedition Caucus

Since 2016, Big Tech PACs and Employees Have Given Nearly $2 Million to Lawmakers Who Voted to Challenge the Presidential Election

By Jane Chung and Mike Tanglis

Download PDF

Big Tech companies rushed to distance themselves from this month’s attempted coup by “deplatforming” then-President Donald Trump and accounts and services, such as Parler, associated with the insurrection. Also in response to the insurrection, all of the Big Tech companies with corporate PACs (Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) have announced a halt in their direct campaign contributions to Members of Congress. While Amazon committed to freezing spending on the Republican election objectors, the three other corporations have announced blanket bans: Facebook has paused PAC spending for at least this quarter, while Google and Microsoft announced indefinite pauses while they review their policies.

Political action committees and employees of Big Tech companies have contributed nearly $2 million to the 147 members of Congress who voted to challenge the electoral college results.

Additionally, CEOs of the five Big Tech companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) made both public and private statements addressing the insurrection. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, tweeted, “Today marks a sad and shameful chapter in our nation’s history. Those responsible for this insurrection should be held to account.” Mark Zuckerberg reportedly sent an email to Facebook employees, writing, “The peaceful transition of power is critical to the functioning of democracy, and we need our political leaders to lead by example and put the nation first.” Also in an internal staff email, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote, “The lawlessness and violence occurring on Capitol Hill today is the antithesis of democracy and we strongly condemn it.” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella failed to provide original commentary, instead retweeting a statement from the Business Roundtable, an association of American CEOs.

Three of the companies have bankrolled an average of 73, or about 50%, of these Members of Congress. Meanwhile, Amazon funded 89 of the 147, or 61%, of the disenfranchisers.

Yet for all their new-found eagerness to denounce the seditionists, Big Tech companies have in fact poured millions into their campaign coffers in recent years.

Public Citizen analyzed contribution data from the Center for Responsive Politics and found that political action committees and employees of Big Tech companies have contributed nearly $2 million since the 2016 election cycle to the 147 members of Congress who voted this month to challenge the electoral college slates of at least one state. Amazon and Google were the most generous givers, contributing $565,000 and $595,000 to the election objectors, respectively.

Table I: Contributions by Big Tech Political Action Committees and employees to Members of Congress who voted to challenge the Electoral College vote, by corporation

bot 6 not shown]

CORPORATION FROM PAC FROM EMPLOYEES TOTAL

Amazon $461,000 $103,536 $564,536

Apple N/A $77,292 $77,292

Facebook $136,000 $67,241 $203,241

Google $502,000 $92,721 $594,721

Microsoft $381,568 $123,786 $505,354

Grand Total $1,480,568 $464,576 $1,945,144

Showing 1 to 6 of 6 entries PreviousNext

In addition, our analysis reveals that three of the companies have bankrolled an average of 73, or about 50% of these Members of Congress. Amazon tops the list, having supported 89 of the 147, 61%, of the disenfranchisers.

Table II: Total contributions and number of representatives funded by Big Tech Political Action Committees and employees to Members of Congress who voted to challenge the Electoral College vote, by corporation

Show

entries

Search:

COMPANY TOTAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO REPRESENTATIVES NUMBER OF REPRESENTATIVES FUNDED

Facebook 136000 24

Google 502000 61

Microsoft 381568 69

Amazon 461000 89

Showing 1 to 4 of 4 entries Previous Next [buttons do not work?]

Key leaders of the “sedition caucus” that led the GOP charge to challenge election results are flush with cash from Big Tech. Senator Ted Cruz received funds from three out of the four corporate PACs[1]. Representative Andy Biggs, who reportedly helped organize the rally that occurred moments before insurrectionists stormed the Capitol, has received support from all four Big Tech corporations’ PACs.

Big Tech’s pause in political spending is a nice start, but it’s not nearly enough. It’s time for Big Tech to shut down, once and for all, its political spending – to shut down its PACs permanently, to commit not to fund super PACs or Dark Money groups, and to disclose money it gives to trade associations that also fund these candidates.

[1] Apple is not included in this list because it does not have a PAC.

Topics

Making Government Work: Corporate Influence in Government

Protecting Democracy: Money in Politics

Unhinged' GOP congressman claims Google 'absolutely' changed its algorithm to 'move 15 million votes' to Biden

David Badash The New Civil Rights Movement

July 09, 2021

U.S. Rep Ken Buck (R-CO) says Google flipped 15 million votes away from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. Buck last year, on tape, as the chair of the Colorado GOP, allegedly tried "pressuring an El Paso County GOP official to falsify election results in the State Senate District 10 race."

"Google, by the way, changed its algorithm, in ...

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https://www.thesixfifty.com/journalist-franklin-foer-tackles-silicon-valleys-sham-populism-4687/

Journalist Franklin Foer tackles Silicon Valley’s “sham populism”

BY THE SIX FIFTY STAFF NOVEMBER 9, 2017

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/08/corporate-lobbying/

no lnx twt

'Democracy for sale': Analysis ties corporate consolidation to increased lobbying

Jessica Corbett and Common Dreams August 26, 2021

An analysis published Wednesday about corporate consolidation and political lobbying in the United States found that large mergers—particularly in Big Tech, the pharmaceutical industry, and the oil and gas sector—has increased corporate control of American democracy.

The new research paper from the American Economic Liberties—entitled Project Democracy for Sale: Examining the Effects of Concentration on Lobbying in the United States (pdf)—was authored by Reed Showalter, an attorney and a fellow at the anti-monopoly group.

"Concentrated markets are bad for consumers, bad for workers, and bad for innovation. But this research suggests that the concentration crisis in America is even more than a purely economic problem—it's also a democracy problem," Showalter said in a statement.

"We urgently need to understand and contain the power that monopolies have over the rest of us," he asserted. "Lawmakers, enforcers, and leaders cannot afford to ignore the widespread harms from concentration any longer."

The report emphasizes that "the bigger companies get, the more powerful they become. A large majority of Americans distrust concentrated economic power, and criticism of the world's largest companies is a regular part of discourse within America's political parties and around the world. Research has borne out the power of money in politics."

"Corporate lobbying works," the paper continues. "A number of studies show that the amount spent on lobbying positively impacts a firm's equity returns and market share. Firms that engage in lobbying also appear to have lower effective tax rates than those that do not."

Given those conditions, Showalter examined the U.S. internet, pharmaceutical, and fossil fuel sectors. The paper notes that the first case study "primarily includes digital platform companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix" and "does not extend, for example, to internet providers and other internet infrastructure companies."

The researcher found "a noteworthy relationship" between consolidation and political activity. Though the data is a bit limited—which the paper acknowledges, urging some degree of caution—it shows that "in all three industries, concentration appears to predict elevated lobbying spending."

According to Showalter:

In the oil and gas industry as well as among internet companies, the more market power a corporation acquires, the more it lobbies. In the pharmaceutical industry, the data is even more compelling. When pharmaceutical companies gained market power, they lobbied more, and when they lost market power, they lobbied less. One tentative conclusion from this analysis is that monopolies seek to acquire political power, whereas competitive businesses focus on competing with each other instead of dominating public rule-making bodies.

"In short, the results of this report suggest that not only is big business good at lobbying, but that bigger business leads to more lobbying," the paper says. "That means monopoly is a threat to representative democracy—and that protecting our democracy requires effective antitrust."

The report also addresses the political implications of Showalter's findings—specifically, the suggestion that the negative impacts of industry concentration "cannot be understood merely through the consumer welfare lens" and using that standard to govern antitrust "allows practitioners in the field to ignore non-price effects" of companies consolidating.

The new research "casts doubt on pure regulatory solutions that do not reduce concentration, since more lobbying can mitigate regulatory action or even turn regulatory choices into mechanisms to protect entrenched incumbents," the paper says. "If concentration begets political influence, then even a hypothetically economically efficient monopoly offering low consumer prices can still be an undemocratic usurper of political power."

In other words, according to the report, "stronger antitrust premised on reducing corporate concentration should be understood not just as a mechanism to address market power problems, but as an anti-corruption measure in itself."

Concluding that "corporate concentration and antidemocratic political influence go hand in hand," Showalter urges U.S. policymakers to recognize the limits of the consumer welfare standard when creating and implementing new regulations for major industries.

"The antitrust laws were a response to rising economic concentration, and the laws' framers recognized that concentrated economic power can poison our democracy," he writes. "This article is a starting point but hopefully also a reminder that antitrust is equipped and designed to grapple with the political ramifications of economic concentration. Those crafting and enforcing the doctrine should feel empowered to step into the shoes they were meant to fill."

The New York Times' "DealBook" newsletter noted Showalter's ties to President Joe Biden:

Showalter's report begins with an interesting acknowledgment, thanking Tim Wu, a former Columbia law professor who is now a technology and competition policy adviser at the White House. What's more, Showalter works at the law firm founded by Jonathan Kanter, whom President Biden recently nominated to lead the Justice Department's antitrust division. Showalter said that Kanter did not discuss the report with him and that his work as a fellow was separate from his day job. But he acknowledged more generally that the expansive approach to antitrust that his report advocated appeared to be ascendant in the halls of power.

The report comes as Congress is considering a package of antitrust bills advanced by the House Judiciary Committee in late June.Demand Progress executive director David Segal pointed out at the time that "many members are reciting Big Tech's talking points and pushing their amendments. This is why it is necessary that Congress act to break these companies up and diminish their power of speech, the economy, and our government."

"No matter what does or doesn't emerge from Congress in the coming weeks or months, it is vital that the Biden administration use existing tools to rein in the power of these monopolies," he added, calling Lina Khan, the president's pick to chair the Federal Trade Commission, "a tremendous step in this direction" and urging more similar actions that prioritize the public interest.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/ayn-rand-myths

Coinbase's plan to go public in April highlights a troubling trend among tech companies: Its founding team will maintain voting control, making it mostly immune to the wishes of outside investors.

The best-known U.S. cryptocurrency exchange is doing this by creating two classes of shares. One class will be available to the public. The other is reserved for the founders, insiders and early investors, and will wield 20 times the voting power of regular shares. That will ensure that after all is said and done, the insiders will control 53.5% of the votes.

Coinbase will join dozens of other publicly traded tech companies – many with household names such as Google, Facebook, Doordash, Airbnb and Slack – that haveissued two types of shares in an effort to retain control for founders and insiders. The reason this is becoming increasingly popular has a lot to do with Ayn Rand, one of Silicon Valley's favorite authors, and the “myth of the founder" her writings have helped inspire.

Engaged investors and governance experts like me generally loathe dual-class shares because they undermine executive accountability by making it harder to rein in a wayward CEO. I first stumbled upon this method executives use to limit the influence of pesky outsiders while working on my doctoral dissertation on hostile takeovers in the late 1980s.

But the risks of this trend are greater than simply entrenching bad management. Today, given the role tech companies play in virtually every corner of American life, it poses a threat to democracy as well.

All in the family

Dual-class voting structures have been around for decades.

When Ford Motor Co. went public in 1956, its founding family used the arrangement to maintain 40% of the voting rights. Newspaper companies like The New York Times and The Washington Post often use the arrangement to protect their journalistic independence from Wall Street's insatiable demands for profitability.

In a typical dual-class structure, the company will sell one class of shares to the public, usually called class A shares, while founders, executives and others retain class B shares with enough voting power to maintain majority voting control. This allows the class B shareholders to determine the outcome of matters that come up for a shareholder vote, such as who is on the company's board.

Advocates see a dual-class structure as a way to fend off short-term thinking. In principle, this insulation from investor pressure can allow the company to take a long-term perspective and make tough strategic changes even at the expense of short-term share price declines. Family-controlled businesses often view it as a way to preserve their legacy, which is why Ford remains a family company after more than a century.

It also makes a company effectively**immune from hostile takeovers and the whims of activist investors.

Checks and balances

But this insulation comes at a cost for investors, who lose a crucial check on management.

Indeed, dual-class shares essentially short-circuit almost all the other means that limit executive power. The board of directors, elected by shareholder vote, is the ultimate authority within the corporation that oversees management. Voting for directors and proposals on the annual ballot are the main methods shareholders have to ensure management accountability, other than simply selling their shares.

Recent research shows that the value and stock returns of dual-class companies are lower than other businesses, and they're more likely to overpay their CEO and waste money on expensive acquisitions.

Companies with dual-class shares rarely made up more than 10% of public listings in a given year until the 2000s, when tech startups began using them more frequently, according to data collected by University of Florida business professor Jay Ritter. The dam began to break after Facebook went public in 2012 with a dual-class stock structure that kept founder Mark Zuckerberg firmly in control – he alone controls almost 60% of the company.

In 2020, over 40% of tech companies that went public did so with two or more classes of shares with unequal voting rights.

This has alarmed governance experts, some investors and legal scholars.

Ayn Rand and the myth of the superhuman founder

If the dual-class structure is bad for investors, then why are so many tech companies able to convince them to buy their shares when they go public?

I attribute it to Silicon Valley's mythology of the founder –- what I would dub an “Ayn Rand theory of corporate governance" that credits founders with superhuman vision and competence that merit deference from lesser mortals. Rand's novels, most notably “Atlas Shrugged," portray an America in which titans of business hold up the world by creating innovation and value but are beset by moochers and looters who want to take or regulate what they have created.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Rand has a strong following among tech founders, whose creative genius may be “threatened" by any form of outside regulation. Elon Musk, Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong and even the late Steve Jobs all have recommended “Atlas Shrugged."

Her work is also celebrated by the venture capitalists who typically finance tech startups – many of whom were founders themselves.

The basic idea is simple: Only the founder has the vision, charisma and smarts to steer the company forward.

It begins with a powerful founding story. Michael Dell and Zuckerberg created their multibillion-dollar companies in their dorm rooms. Founding partner pairs Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and Bill Hewlett and David Packard built their first computer companies in the garage – Apple and Hewlett-Packard, respectively. Often the stories are true, but sometimes, as in Apple's case, less so.

And from there, founders face a gantlet of rigorous testing: recruiting collaborators, gathering customers and, perhaps most importantly, attracting multiple rounds of funding from venture capitalists. Each round serves to further validate the founder's leadership competence.

The Founders Fund, a venture capital firm that has backed dozens of tech companies, including Airbnb, Palantir and Lyft, is one of the biggest proselytizers for this myth, as it makes clear in its “manifesto."

“The entrepreneurs who make it have a near-messianic attitude and believe their company is essential to making the world a better place," it asserts. True to its stated belief, the fund says it has “never removed a single founder," which is why it has been a big supporter of dual-class share structures.

Another venture capitalist who seems to favor giving founders extra power is Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. His venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is Coinbase's biggest investor. And most of the companies in its portfolio that have gone public also used a dual-class share structure, according to my own review of their securities filings.

Bad for companies, bad for democracy

Giving founders voting control disrupts the checks and balances needed to keep business accountable and can lead to big problems.

WeWork founder Adam Neumann, for example, demanded “unambiguous authority to fire or overrule any director or employee." As his behavior became increasingly erratic, the company hemorrhaged cash in the lead-up to its ultimately canceled initial public offering.

Investors forced out Uber's Travis Kalanick in 2017, but not before he's said to have created a workplace culture that allegedly allowed sexual harassment and discrimination to fester. When Uber finally went public in 2019, it shed its dual-class structure.

There is some evidence that founder-CEOs are less gifted at management than other kinds of leaders, and their companies' performance can suffer as a consequence.

But investors who buy shares in these companies know the risks going in. There's much more at stake than their money.

What happens when powerful, unconstrained founders control the most powerful companies in the world?

The tech sector is increasingly laying claim to central command posts of the U.S. economy. Americans' access to news and information, financial services, social networks and even groceries is mediated by a handful of companies controlled by a handful of people.

Recall that in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter were able to eject former President Donald Trump from his favorite means of communication – virtually silencing him overnight. And Apple, Google and Amazon cut off Parler, the right-wing social media platform used by some of the insurrectionists to plan their actions. Not all of these companies have dual-class shares, but this illustrates just how much power tech companies have over America's political discourse.

One does not have to disagree with their decision to see that a form of political power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of companies with limited outside oversight.

Jerry Davis, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and Professor of Management and Sociology, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/ayn-rand-myths

Coinbase's plan to go public in April highlights a troubling trend among tech companies: Its founding team will maintain voting control, making it mostly immune to the wishes of outside investors.

All in the family

Dual-class voting structures have been around for decades.

It also makes a company effectively**immune from hostile takeovers and the whims of activist investors.

Checks and balances

But this insulation comes at a cost for investors, who lose a crucial check on management.

In 2020, over 40% of tech companies that went public did so with two or more classes of shares with unequal voting rights.

This has alarmed governance experts, some investors and legal scholars.

Ayn Rand and the myth of the superhuman founder

If the dual-class structure is bad for investors, then why are so many tech companies able to convince them to buy their shares when they go public?

Her work is also celebrated by the venture capitalists who typically finance tech startups – many of whom were founders themselves.

The basic idea is simple: Only the founder has the vision, charisma and smarts to steer the company forward.

Bad for companies, bad for democracy

Giving founders voting control disrupts the checks and balances needed to keep business accountable and can lead to big problems.

There is some evidence that founder-CEOs are less gifted at management than other kinds of leaders, and their companies' performance can suffer as a consequence.

But investors who buy shares in these companies know the risks going in. There's much more at stake than their money.

What happens when powerful, unconstrained founders control the most powerful companies in the world?

One does not have to disagree with their decision to see that a form of political power is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of companies with limited outside oversight.

Jerry Davis, Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and Professor of Management and Sociology, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trump-google/

zephyr teachout break up

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an 1020

justice Department and 11 states sue Google in antitrust case: 'Long overdue'

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/trumpcare-doesnt-exist-but-that-doesnt-stop-nevertheless-facebook-and-google-cash-in-on-misleading-ads-for-garbage-health-insurance-h1/

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/ralph-nader-ranks-the-infinite-greed-power-and-controls-of-giant-corporations

Ralph Nader ranks the infinite greed, power and controls of giant corporations

The combination of greed and power often spin out of control and challenge the enforceable rule of law and the countervailing force of the organized civic community.

When greed and power are exercised by giant multinational corporations that escape the discipline of the nation-state, the potential for evil becomes infinite in nature. Enough is never enough.

Global giant companies, aided and abetted by their corporate attorneys and accountants, can literally decide how little taxes they are going to pay by shifting profits and expenses among different tax haven countries such as Ireland, Luxembourg, and Panama.

These same companies then proceed to lobby any nation, including most prominently the United States. Congress and the White House are pushed to cut formal tax rates, pack the tax laws with loopholes, and lower further the effective tax rate. The formal top tax rate for billions of company profits is now 21%, while the actual tax rate is lower – much lower for banks, insurance companies, drug companies, and behemoth tech companies like Apple that master tax avoidance.

"Generous” is not a word one can associate either with Apple or it’s avaricious, CEO Tim Cook. One of the first moves Tim Cook made, after replacing legendary Apple Founder, the cancer-stricken innovator Steve Jobs, was to arrange a $378 million, 2011 compensation package for himself and launch the biggest stock buyback in corporate history. Apple, which is worth $1.5 trillion has spent $327 billion since 2013 to buy back 2.5 billion shares of stock. Yet Apple has done little to produce productive investments, remediation of used and very toxic Apple products when discarded, or increase pay for the 350,000 serf-labor workers in China toiling under its merciless contractor Foxconn.

Apple made $104 billion in the last 12 months, puffed up by tax-avoidance, tax cuts and a no tariff deal with Trump on its Chinese imports, yet Tim Cook has rejected pleas to spend a little over $2 billion (deductible) to award a full year’s pay bonus to the 350,000 Foxconn workers who build Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

Apple’s massive stock buybacks have, however, increased the metrics to set compensation levels for Tim Cook and his executive sidekicks. Unfortunately, stock buybacks do little to tamp down excessive prices for Apple products. The massive stock buybacks also send a message that Apple’s management has no other uses for its corporate cash – not for R&D, not for improving the nature and security of its workers’ pensions, not for investing in curtailing the damaging side effects of Apple products on the environment and not for reducing other offloaded damage to society.

Tim Cook and Apple are also stingy, given their vast wealth, with charitable contributions. So stingy that Apple’s bosses do not even come close with the company’s charitable deduction limit of five percent of adjusted gross income. In 2018 Apple gave $125 million to charities. Apple’s net income for 2018 was $59.53 billion – a tiny fraction of one percent!

Recently, the New York Times published articles showing how tiny the executive pay cuts were by the very few executives who announced and declared sympathy for their laid-off and impoverished workers.The media has also been reporting illicit maneuvers developed by corporate attorneys to help chain stores get relief payments that should have gone to legitimate small businesses. (Why isn’t the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) speaking out against this abuse and avarice?)

Replacing some of their greed with generosity could be directed to the estimated $6 billion to $11 billion needed this coming school year to give low-income students full equipment and connectivity to the internet for remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. States and localities need $4 billion to assure the voting process will be fair and that all votes be counted and on time. The Republicans in the Senate are blocking the money needed to guarantee free and fair elections. Four billion dollars for the profit-glutted Silicon Valley giants Facebook, Google, Apple plus Amazon, and Microsoft, is peanuts. These high-tech digital giants could easily contribute the money needed to avert a widely predicted election time disaster and weeks of understaffed counting after November 3^rd. Imagine such a show of patriotism from these companies.

Then there are the matters of woefully inadequate supplies, facilities, and training programs to counter the spreading Covid-19 pandemic that is crumbling the economy. These record-setting profitable companies, with soaring stock prices due to their monopolistic powers or consumer-gouging, should return some of Trump’s giveaway tax cuts of 2017 and the burgeoning corporate welfare payments from crony-capitalistic Washington, D.C. to help their afflicted or vulnerable fellow Americans. Many of these people are their own workers, friends, and relatives.

Economists should develop a “Hedonistic Index,” to rank the “greed-with-power” status of the 500 largest U.S. corporations.

People have the right to know how CEOs and major corporations do on the “Hedonistic Index” of greed and power. After all, at the end of the day, we are all paying the price of the full measure of the infinite avarice spiraling from these corporate supremacists and their private governments of control.

---

ICE and oil:

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23072020/extinction-rebellion-greenpeace-google-microsoft-apple-tech-oil

When Sam Kern started working at Google four years ago, she believed she could drive change as an insider. If she could just "get the ear" of the right executives, Kern thought, she could convince them to move the company in a new direction on climate and sustainability.

But over time, Kern said she realized, powerful moneyed interests made that impossible.

Kern, a user experience engineer, described company leaders as "putting up a wall between the business interests and human interests," even as they seemed to recognize the severity of the climate crisis, which made conversations with them feel emotionally disconnected.

so Kern turned to more direct activism. After becoming involved with the employee group Googlers for Climate Action, Kern joined thousands of tech workers who walked outof their offices during last September's global climate strike to demand bold climate commitments from their employers. And she didn't stop there.

Kern left Google in May and joined the radical climate activist group Extinction Rebellion, which earlier this month launched a digital campaign, bigtechlovesbigoil.com,targeting tech majors Google, Microsoft and Amazon for providing oil and gas companies with cloud computing services,custom artificial intelligence and machine learning tools.

By then, Greenpeace had also launched an effort to stop Amazon, Google and Microsoft from working with Big Oil in ways that help oil and gas companies extract fossil fuels and cause further global warming.

In May, Greenpeace published "Oil in the Cloud," a report that said the three tech giants had spent years pursuing lucrative deals to supply Chevron, Shell, BP and ExxonMobil with technology to enhance fossil fuel extraction and production. As the paper highlighted, all three tech majors have bold public-facing sustainability commitments, centered around reducing their companies' carbon footprint and investing in renewable energy. ...

1 0

Microsoft, Amazon, and PayPal Executives All Have Seats on the Boards of Police Foundations

New research shows tech companies’ police involvement goes way beyond their products

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Sarah Emerson

:{:{}:

Jun 18

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/**silicon-valley-rips-off-the-mask-as-tech-ceos-veer-right**-amid-political-turmoil/

karlis

The times are a-changing in Silicon Valley. Once a reliable bastion of libertarianism from the CEOs at the top to the workers at the bottom, new schisms are forming between the workers and the owners — from white-collar software engineers unionizing at Kickstarter to Googlers and Amazon workers publicly denouncing their executives.

This article firstappeared in Salon.

Yet as employees have begun to wake up to the many ways in which their employers exploited them in exchange for nap pods and free snacks, the titans of industry themselves appear to be showing their true colors. The pandemic prompted mass layoffs and swift changes in policy for many tech titans; yet coupled with the anti-police racism protests, we are starting to see the far-right soul of Silicon Valley’s leaders — belying the stereotype of technology as synonymous with progressivism.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, profited tremendously off the pandemic, seeing his wealth rise $30 billion. Yet his empire still saw fit to stop paying a $2 an hour hazard pay bonus to its warehouse workers — a high-risk job. Putting them at risk has resulted in a lawsuit from warehouse workers, claiming the company put their families at risk.

amazon continues to try and position itself as a progressive company, unlike other big corporations. Recently, Amazon tried to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement by tweeting “the inequitable and brutal treatment of Black people in our country must stop. Together we stand in solidarity with the Black community — our employees, customers, and partners — in the fight against systemic racism and injustice.”

There was a tinge of irony to the statement, given the company’s history of enabled authoritarian surveillance. To that end, the American Civil Liberties Union quickly replied: “Cool tweet. Will you commit to stop selling face recognition surveillance technology that supercharges police abuse?”

Bezos isn’t the only CEO who treats his workers with utter disregard for safety or health. Tesla Inc. In mid-May,CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that he was defying Alameda County shelter-in-place order and restarting production at the Alameda County Tesla factory, which employs more than 10,000 people. On his Twitter account, Musk said he will be “on the [assembly] line with everyone else,” and stated that he was willing to be arrested for the noble “cause” of restarting production. Musk filed a lawsuit against Alameda County for injunctive relief and threatened to take his factory to another state, then took a jab at the Alameda County’s interim health officer, Dr. Erica Pan, whom Musk called “ignorant.”

Previously, Musk expressed repeated disdain for the virus or the potential for a pandemic (i.e. “the coronavirus panic is dumb“) mirroring much of the American right, who value economic activity over lives and pivoted their politics to that effect, in defiance of scientific evidence and models.

The Trumpian head-in-sand attitude coming from Musk is unsurprising. As I’ve written before, Musk and Trump have much in common: they’re both entitled, wealthy businessmen who profit off the backs of a vast underclass — which is why Musk played the victim card when his factory couldn’t operate during shelter-in-place.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has shown bitter resistance in the face of evidence that his platform has become a fount of disinformation around both the coronavirus and the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests. In an interview with Fox News last week, Zuckerberg said that he doesn’t believe social media platforms should become the “arbiter of truth”.

“We have a different policy than Twitter on this,” Zuckerberg said in comments that first aired Wednesday. “I believe strongly that Facebook shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general private companies, or especially these platform companies, shouldn’t be in the position of doing that.”

The comments mirror his attitude in 2017, when he commented on Facebook’s role in fomenting political disinformation amid the 2016 election. “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way — I think that is a pretty crazy idea,” Zuckerberg said then. “Voters make decisions based on their lived experience.”

Zuckerberg’s attitude towards the role of social media in serving as an arbiter of truth differs from his peers at Snapchat and, recently, Twitter, which made an about-face in its policies around Trump’s sophistic tweets. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey fired back at Zuckerberg: “We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make. This does not make us an ‘arbiter of truth.’ Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions.”

Zuckerberg’s inaction with regard to censoring or labeling Trump’s misinformation has led up to unprecedented internal actions this week, like employees staging a virtual walkout. Facebook employees are notorious for their fealty to their CEO; internal leaks or dissent were rare, until recently.

They say the bad times bring out the best in people. In that case, it’s certainly worth examining why Silicon Valley’s overlords appear to be a notable exception.

book, Platform Capitalism

APRIL 9, 2020

Always Day One

Buzzfeed News senior technology reporter Alex Kantrowitzprovided a look at the inner workings and business strategies of large tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google. This virtual event was hosted by IVY.

***

https://www.c-span.org/video/?469939-1/the-information-trade

MARCH 3, 2020

The Information Trade

Alexis Wichowski, deputy chief technology officer for New York City, talked about the power dynamic between big tech companies and governments around the world.

anti-terrror policy, disaster releif....

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https://www.pbs.org/video/big-tech-dystopia-incorporated-2pe3lu/

THE OPEN MIND

Big Tech = Dystopia Incorporated

04/13/2020 | 26m 52s |Video has closed captioning.

not vetted

NBC News dystopia beat reporter Ben Collins discusses exposing viral deception and the companies that enable it.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?467773-1/after-words-rana-foroohar

not vetted

JANUARY 9, 2020

After Words with Rana Foroohar

Financial Times columnist and CNN analyst Rana Foroohartalked about her book, Don’t Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US, in which she argued that large tech companies are failing to keep consumer data and privacy safe and secure. She was interviewed by CNBC’s Jon Fortt.

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YIKES omg

catastrophe-looking-back-at-the-mayhem-of-the-2010s/

A decade closer to catastrophe: Looking back at the mayhem of the 2010s

Written by Anis Shivani / Salon January 5, 2020

no lnx

A decade closer to catastrophe: Looking back at the mayhem of the 2010s

Written by Anis Shivani / Salon January 5, 2020

No, I do not mean climate change, though that too — or, more generally, ecological collapse, since I hate reducing the nature of the ecological challenge to the words “climate change,” which are simultaneously reductive and fatalistic, and at the same time weirdly exculpatory. And by looking at it in abstraction from the human actions which beckon the catastrophe, one avoids its true meaning altogether.

What did we get much closer to then, in the time period from 2010 to 2019? Most worrying to me, a flattening of human consciousness. People everywhere, because capitalist globalization goes on unchecked, speak a simpler language, shun centuries or millennia of cultural tradition, live in a Twitter-vacuum of the moment, echoing platformed thoughts, imbibing the latest hypocrisy dressed as outrage, sounding like everyone else even when they do resort to speaking their native languages. The same limited cultural producers, dramatically declining in range and number (in the U.S. we seem to be down to just about one worthy newspaper, the New York Times), offering the same vacant thoughts. The dream of cultural uniformity, and therefore cultural annihilation, is much closer than it was 10 years ago. That’s a big change, and for me the most notable one.

Technology has pushed this along, this flattening of human culture, just as it has taken huge steps forward in annihilating privacy and autonomy.I’ve been rereading for the last few years the classics of golden-age science fiction, and one thing that almost everyone — Isaac Asimov, Clifford Simak, Arthur C. Clarke, Algis Budrys, Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth (as a duo), Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. van Vogt and others — missed is the power of technology to track and control us at the mundane level. Nearly all the plots of classic science fiction seem irrelevant now in the face of technology that makes day-to-day elusiveness impossible. That was the one big thing — unlike, say, nuclear power — those writers almost completely overlooked. Their minds, even when writing about millennia into the future, couldn’t grasp the scale of technological control that was actually just around the corner.

Certain facile conclusions are possible about where we have been and where we’re headed. If you look at the rise of Occupy and before that the Tea Party, and more recently Trumpism, Brexit and millennial-style democratic socialism, it seems easy to conclude that the days of conventional neoliberal economics are over. In this prism, populism— whether of a Narendra Modi or a Donald Trump — is resurgent, in opposition to neoliberalism’s reduction of the human being to globally tradable commodity, with all the uniqueness of culture, tradition, ideology, philosophy, art and literature stripped away. But if you consider neoliberalism as being enfolded within capitalism, as being a variant rather than a substitute of the higher power, then the protest movements of the last decade, both on the left and right, seem relatively impotent. Because they are not yet aiming at the real enemy — no, not even American democratic socialism, it seems to me.

Power, in fact, has filtered to certain overlords in the technological world, the Jeff Bezoses and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world having consolidated infinitely more ability to dictate patterns of thought and behavior than anyone would have thought possible at the start of the last decade. They have faced very little resistance: The Russiagate attack on Facebook is fraught with doublespeak, with the “liberal” side exposing its hypocrisy with respect to what has been derisively relabeled the “deep state” — and used to be called the military-industrial complex by respectable dissidents — because they stand in symbiotic relationship with the populist masses who have voluntarily delegated this power upward to them. As long as they can preen and posture, to the delight of their own minute cults, the quiet relinquishment of power and the voluntary erasure of privacy seem to be a price worth paying.

Without privacy, no liberalism. Without print, no liberalism. Without due process of law (consider the various hotheaded cultural movements of the last decade stemming mostly from the liberal side), no liberalism. Without cultural distinction, and the mental space that makes it possible, free from technological determinism, no liberalism. Without reasonable upward mobility even on superficial materialist terms, no liberalism. Without minimal consensus about history and the empirical basis of political narrative, no liberalism.

The movie “Idiocracy” once seemed like a wild exaggeration, despite the patent idiocy of George Bush the younger, during whose peak era the movie was made. Now, at the end of this decade, Mike Judge’s film seems to have been under-boiled, a fainthearted effort at capturing the kind of dumbness the population at large would come to embody.The populist leader in “Idiocracy” seems almost enlightened compared to the actual reality today.

The last decade consolidated the illiberal trends of the decade that preceded it — the one that gave the world the war on terror, and the assorted bureaucratic tools to separate wanted and unwanted people, many of those instruments unprecedented in scope and power. Thus we remain on the linear trend of the gradual dissolution of empire that began as soon as the Soviet Union disintegrated and really took off at the turn of the millennium. Twenty years have gone by, and another 30 or so remain before this saga is all wrapped up.

For the coming decade, certain obvious predictions are in order.An economic collapse, since the fundamental skew toward debt and leverage was never addressed — and can’t be, within the straitjacket American capitalism has forced itself into — which will usher in a stronger wave of austerity, reaction, xenophobia and social Darwinism than was the case in the wake of the last economic crash. And continued political fragmentation, which won’t be anything new, but will be orders of magnitude greater than anything we experienced in the previous decade.

Ten years ago, most large American cities (except for New York and San Francisco, most prominently) were still affordable to large numbers of people. If you go to Los Angeles today, you would never dare to make such an assertion. The crisis of affordability, whereby perfectly good housing that could accommodate normal people has been converted into empty financial space controlled from a distance by oligarchies that refuse to be named, has infected every American city. It does not stem from independent forces, but works in perfect correlation with the new technological prowess to separate the wanted from the unwanted.

I’m sorry, but democratic socialism as it is being marketed now, and which is successfully recruiting large numbers of millennial followers, was suitable for 1990. It is not suitable for 2020. It can’t even begin to address the social pathologies engendered by the last 30 years of unchecked capitalism. Most evidently, it can’t even bring into the ideological fold more than half the voting population, who will fight it tooth and nail, to their own death if necessary, precisely because it promises the kind of love and compassion for which they see no place in public life, except as a form of unwanted weakness.

This linear progression toward absolute chaos and division and fragmentation and quarantine and erasure has become all too predictable. It used to be that Hollywood loved to destroy Manhattan, the ultimate nerve center of empire, over and over again, as an act of love: To declare total fealty to America is to wish to demolish it at its liveliest core, it seems. The era of such movies has passed, their peak being the 1990s, and to a lesser extent the 2000s, both more transitional decades than the one that has just ended. Manhattan is already hollow, cured, pacified, irrelevant, silent, gored at its core. There is no need for Hollywood to step in with its short-order apocalypses.

At the end of the decade, after 10 years that were remarkably free of memorable movies and literature, came two of the best ever. I found Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” as compelling as any American movie I’ve ever seen,and his edgy refusal to go quietly into the sunset, as he faces his own mortality, is a testament to his will to tell the truth. The mob is America. It is not a subculture or a split from the mainstream, it is the very essence of America. The small hoodlum (I just rewatched “Mean Streets” from 1973, the first Robert De Niro and Scorsese collaboration) becomes the big hoodlum almost without note, which is what we call America. The sense of wrapping up, of imminent farewell, transcends Scorsese’s personal alarm toward mortality, and is rather a postulate that all of our lives, during these hyper-capitalist last few decades, have been in vain. There is not even sorrow or apology or penance to be had, as is embodied in De Niro’s luminous characterization.

And the novel that spoke to me most resonantly about this exact same dread — this fear of an opportunity for reclamation that went by in a moment’s glimpse before it was even adequately grasped — was “Quichotte,” Salman Rushdie’s best novel since “Midnight’s Children,” published almost four decades ago, just a couple of years after the ayatollahs seized Iran and set in motion furies that still haven’t subsided. “Quichotte” has a lot in common with “The Irishman,” and I encourage readers to look at how far advanced the superficial Hollywood project of annihilating America has become in these trustworthy hands, a giant of filmmaking on the one hand, and of literature on the other hand. The myth of America, in “Quichotte,” is fully encompassed, which is the only reason why alternative (fantastical) myths can be offered, which Rushdie, generous to a fault, does, in plenty.

During the last decade every opportunity for intellectual clarity was passed up by the well-spoken elites — in the academy, in publishing and writing, in all of the arts — as people were encouraged to retreat into their private hells of belief, unwilling to meet other people at face value, living out suspicion, paranoia, conspiracy, fear-mongering and delusion at the most personal level. To give up your humanity without even the promise of anything in return (which is what something like the escalation of social media dependency or call-out culture or ideological surrender represents) is quite something. That’s what this last decade demonstrated in spades. It was not a pretty sight, and it’s about to get worse.

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https://www.wired.com/story/house-antitrust-hearing-amazon-facebook/

TODAY’S YOUNGER, MORE tech-savvy breed of House Democrats may spend a lot of their time online, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy with the tech companies they rely on. In fact, it seems the more testimony they hear from top Silicon Valley executives, the louder their calls to regulate these behemoth technology firms become.

This was starkly on display Tuesday, as senior officials fromAmazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google testifiedin front of a powerfulHouse Judiciary subcommittee as a part of an ongoing investigation into potential antitrust violations from the nation’s tech giants.

All the executives maintained that their companies face fierce competition at every turn, especially now with Chinese competitors like WeChat and TikTok eating into their global market share. But whenever Democrats pressed them about the details that are the foundation of those claims and their business practices, they rebuffed the questions and said they’d have to report back later.

“It is frustrating. It definitely is frustrating, which definitely means that we’re asking the right kinds of questions and that we recognize that this is an ongoing issue,” freshman representative Lucy McBath (D–Georgia) told WIRED as she was exiting the committee room. “We need to always make sure there’s always healthy competition, you know, more choices for consumers.”

While tech companies like Google have been investigated and fined overseas for anticompetitive practices (in fact, the European Union just opened a new investigation into Amazon this week), US lawmakers and regulators have traditionally been more laissez-faire on antitrust. That’s changed over the past few years, however, amid a wider reckoning with the size and power of these companies and their impacts on everything from consumer privacy to American democracy. Congress is watching Silicon Valley closely—three separate tech hearings took place across Capitol Hill on Tuesday alone. Some lawmakers, including presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have even proposed breaking up some of the companies.

At the antitrust hearing, Amazon and Facebook executives faced the brunt of lawmakers’ increasing annoyance with what many feel is Silicon Valley titans’ dismissive treatment of the political class in Washington.

“Is Facebook, in your view, a monopoly?” freshman representative Joe Neguse (D–Colorado) asked Matt Perault, Facebook's public policy director.

“No, congressman, it is not,” Perault replied.

That answer didn’t sit well with Neguse, who went on to press Perault about the scope of a company that also includes Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger—giving Facebook four of the top slots in today’s social media landscape.

“When a company owns four of the largest six entities measured by active users in the world in that industry, we have a word for that,” Neguse said. “And that’s monopoly.”

Still, Perault ended the hearing where he began, claiming Facebook has a number of business rivals in today’s marketplace. “Many of our competitors are sitting at this table with me,” he argued.

The tech firms did find some sympathetic ears on the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, including the top Republican on the panel. “Just because a business is big doesn’t mean it is bad,” representative Jim Sensenbrenner (R–Wisconsin) told his colleagues and the executives at one point.

Democrats weren’t arguing big is bad. They were arguing too big, too powerful, and too unregulated is bad for consumers, which is why a couple of lawmakers pressed Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel for competition, about its acquisition policies.

“When people sell products on your site, do you track which products are most successful and then do you sometimes create a product to compete with that product?” representative Pramila Jayapal (D–Washington) asked, a line of questioning she returned to again.

Throughout the hearing. Sutton maintained the company line: “We do not use individual seller data in order to compete with them.”

The chair of the antitrust subcommittee seemed to view that claim with skepticism, reminding Sutton twice that he was under oath. "You do collect enormous data about what products are popular, what’s selling, where they’re selling," representative David Cicilline (D–Rhode Island) told the witness. “You’re saying you don’t use that in any way to promote Amazon products? And I’d remind you, you’re under oath.”

“We use data to serve our customers,” Sutton replied.

That answer isn’t what Jayapal wanted to hear. She has been exploring setting up a board of experts to oversee and regulate these Silicon Valley firms.

“The argument they’re trying to make is: They don’t acquire competition; they acquire businesses that make their business better, and oh, if they happen to be competitors, well oops, that’s not why they acquired them,” she told WIRED after asking her questions. “I think that’s disingenuous.”

####

After the executives were dismissed, Cicilline vented to reporters outside the hearing room.

“I think we’re going to have to test some of the representations that were at this hearing to facts that we collect during the course of the investigation,” Cicilline said. “I don’t think there’s any question that we cannot expect them to regulate themselves. We’ve seen the total absence of any ability to regulate themselves, so I think it will absolutely require some action by Congress.”

Cicillinesays that action could come in the form of new laws, working with the relevant federal agencies to tighten regulations on their own, or through Congress providing more resources to antitrust agencies with the express purpose of keeping these companies on the perpetual hot seat—or even a combination of all three.

“The notion that they all see themselves in fierce competition I think strains credulity,” he said.

This was the antitrust subcommittee’s second hearing into what many call the monopolistic practices of Silicon Valley’s largest firms, and they’re not done.

“This was an important hearing to have, but we have a lot of work to do to continue to understand and collect evidence about the anti-competitive behavior or the absence of competition, about the practices of favoring their own services and products,” Cicilline said. “We have a lot more to do.”

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/11/china-surveillance-google-ibm-semptian/

no lnx

What your data is really worth to Facebook

ROBERT J. SHAPIRO / WASHINGTON MONTHLY

28 JUN 2019 AT 16:02 ET

Americans who use the internet—85.5 percent of us—have made a tacit bargain with Facebook, Google, MasterCard, Verizon, and most other sites and products we use regularly. We get access to these companies’ services, and they get to scoop up, analyze, and sell our personal information. Few people question this setup, perhaps because most of us assume that our data isn’t worth much.

But that assumption is wrong.

Earlier this year, my colleague Siddhartha Aneja and I published a deep-dive study into the value of the personal information that every major website sells access to. It’s a complicated problem. Much of the value comes from advertising revenue, disclosed in annual reports and SEC filings by public companies. But we also had to determine how much of that ad revenue is derived specifically from the micro-targeting that user data makes possible, as well as how much the companies spent to gather, analyze, and market user profiles. In the end, we calculated that internet companies earned an average of $202 per American internet user in 2018 from personal data. We believe that’s a conservative estimate.

The value reflects the extraordinarily varied and detailed data that companies collect. Google collects not only the personal information you reveal when you use its search engine, but also the data that comes from whatever you do when you visit or use any of its dozens of properties—YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, the Chrome browser, Google Pay—or apps accessed by logging in through Google. Similarly, Facebook gathers all the data crumbs you leave whenever you visit the site itself or use its Messenger service, plus whatever you do on subsidiaries like Instagram and on apps accessed by logging in through Facebook.

Amazon is newer to this business, and unlike Facebook and Google, its basic business model doesn’t rely on data-derived profits. But Amazon’s public records show that its earnings from user data likely more than doubled between 2016 and 2018. Beyond the major platforms, hundreds of other companies take part in the burgeoning personal data business. Our study also explored the revenues from digital advertising earned by smaller internet services, ranging from Snapchat and Spotify to internet media holding companies such as IAC, which owns Match.com, the Daily Beast, and Investopedia.

For a general sense of the value of people’s personal data to these companies, we started with digital advertising revenue. In 2018, Facebook earned an average of roughly $110 in ad revenue per American user. This calculation, however, ignores what it costs to collect, analyze, and market user data. According to the balance sheet on file with the SEC, Facebook earned $55.8 billion worldwide in 2018, virtually all of it from targeted advertising. Facebook also reported that relevant costs came to $20.6 billion. That implies that the value of its users’ personal information was equivalent to $35.2 billion, or 63 percent of Facebook’s earnings.

In other cases, determining a company’s data-related costs is less straightforward. Google’s cost data, for example, is embedded in the balance sheets for Alphabet, the holding company that also includes Google Fiber, GV (former Google Ventures), CapitalG, Waymo, and Google Deep Mind, as well as the suite of Google-branded internet services.

Given these issues, we developed a proxy to distinguish the value of personal information to the online platforms and the costs to gather and monetize those data. We relied on a careful study by three business school economists who analyzed certain aspects of the Ad-Choices program created by the online advertising industry. In 2010, AdChoices announced that anyone could opt out of all targeted online ads by registering at a special website. While relatively few internet users opted out, the researchers found that those non-targeted ads produced 52 percent less revenue than comparable targeted ones. This suggests that 52 percent of digital advertising revenue is derived from the personal information used to target those ads to particular individuals.

Since targeted online advertising generated $108.6 billion in overall revenue in 2018, on this basis we estimate that the profits derived from American internet users’ personal data totaled $56.5 billion. Some 279.7 million Americans used the internet last year, so the value of their personal data to these online operations, after costs, came to an average of $202 per American internet user.

Our personal information is worth so much because the profiles created from it are remarkably probing and detailed. Algorithms track and save data on what we search for, what we write in emails and messages, what we buy, and everything else we do online, whether on our phones or laptops. Not only do the algorithms then build up a basic profile based on gender, age, ethnicity, and so on; they also determine our individual interests, likes and dislikes, family background, political leanings, sexual orientation, and much more. Everything we reveal online is fair game.

As the software for data mining and targeting has advanced, the revenue from digital ads and the consequent value of the data used to target them have risen rapidly. Our study found that from 2016 to 2018, the value of the information Google mined from Americans grew 40 percent; for Facebook, 85 percent; and for the latecomer Amazon, 312 percent. Overall, the value internet companies derive from Americans’ personal data increased almost 54 percent. At that rate, the number will reach $127.9 billion in four years. Adjusting for the estimated increase in the number of Americans using the internet, people’s personal data will be worth an average of $434 per American user in 2022.

Given how profitable these data operations are, the practice is sure to spread, and the commercial, social, and other uses of our personal data—and the related side effects—will proliferate. In response, we can try to regulate it, but we shouldn’t be surprised when tech companies figure out how to deflect or defeat such regulation.

Instead of regulation, then, we should consider a more direct economic response. Imagine the profits General Motors could achieve if it didn’t have to pay for the steel it uses to build cars. Like GM, online companies should pay their users for the valuable raw materials they provide.

Behind this proposal is the principle that people have a property interest in their personal information, or at least in the wealth generated by that information. This theory does not depend on any particular position on privacy. Rather, it comes directly from John Locke’s analysis of the origins of property, which are embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Locke said that a person can create property by mixing his or her labor with materials from nature, because each of us has personal ownership of our own bodies and minds and, therefore, of whatever we produce by using our minds to direct our bodies. Every piece of personal information online companies gather, analyze, and sell is the result of that very same process, so it meets Locke’s test for personal property. Someone can persuade you to give it away—but if they mislead you about its value to them, either you’re a sucker or they’re a fraud.

Congress should recognize people’s property rights over their personal information and direct that internet companies do so as well. It’s true that the structure of the internet complicates the analysis, because the value of one person’s personal information to an online platform is bound up in the platform’s access to the personal information from many millions of other people. Economists call this a “network effect.” Just as Facebook’s value to any individual increases as more people use it, so the value of any individual’s personal data to Facebook and its advertisers increases as Facebook gathers and analyzes data from millions of other users.

In other words, internet companies and their users both contribute to the commercial value of the personal profiles that drive digital advertising. A straightforward solution is thus to require the companies to share the profits from those operations with users on a fifty-fifty basis. Of course, asking internet companies to write a check to every individual user would be impossibly inefficient. Instead, each company could write a single check to the government, and the government could distribute the proceeds to every household based on the number of its internet users. So, in 2022, a family of four internet users would receive $868 in payment for their personal data. The era of free riding for online companies would be over. Corporations have gotten rich by exploiting our data. It’s time for them to share the wealth.

Kansas City Star editorial board blasts Missouri Republican for bill aimed at big tech companies: ‘A dangerous assault on the First Amendment’

by Alex Henderson June 20, 2019

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley is drawing criticism from both the left and the right for a bill they are stressing would reduce First Amendment protections for large tech companies. And…

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https://www.democracynow.org/2019/6/19/big_techs_war_for_your_wallet

In a move that could reshape the world’s financial system, Facebook has unveiled plans to launch a new global digital currency called Libra. Facebook announced its plans on Tuesday after secretly working on the cryptocurrency for more than a year. It will launch Libra next year in partnership with other large companies including Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber. Facebook said it wants to create “a simple global currency and infrastructure that empowers billions of people.” The plan has already come under fierce criticism from financial regulators and lawmakers. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown tweeted, “Facebook is already too big and too powerful, and it has used that power to exploit users’ data without protecting their privacy. We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight.” We speak with David Dayen, the executive editor of The American Prospect. He recently wrote a piece for The New Republic headlined “The Final Battle in Big Tech’s War to Dominate Your World.”

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GONZÁLEZ: In a move that could reshape the world’s financial system, Facebook has unveiled plans to launch a new global digital currency called Libra. Facebook announced its plans Tuesday after secretly working on the cryptocurrency for more than a year. It plans to launch Libra next year in partnership with other large companies—among them, Visa, Mastercard, PayPal and Uber. Facebook said it wants to create, quote, “a simple global currency and infrastructure that empowers billions of people.” David Marcus, Facebook’s cryptocurrency chief, appeared on CNBC on Tuesday.

DAVID MARCUS: If you want to compare Libra with traditional cryptocurrencies, the first thing and the first big difference is that typically cryptocurrencies are investment vehicles or, you know, investment assets rather than being great medium of exchange. And this is really designed, from the ground up, to be a great medium of exchange, a very high-quality form of digital money that you can use for everyday payments and cross-border payments, microtransactions and all kinds of different things.

AMY GOODMAN: Facebook’s plan has already come under fierce criticism from financial regulators and lawmakers. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Libra must not become a sovereign currency. In Washington, the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, Congressmember Maxine Waters, called on Facebook to pause its development of Libra until lawmakers and regulators have an opportunity to examine these issues and take action. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown tweeted, quote, “Facebook is already too big and too powerful, and it has used that power to exploit users’ data without protecting their privacy. We cannot allow Facebook to run a risky new cryptocurrency out of a Swiss bank account without oversight,” Brown said.

To talk more about Facebook’s plans for a new digital currency, we’re joined by David Dayen. He is executive editor of The American Prospect, recently wrote a piece for The New Republic headlined “The Final Battle in Big Tech’s War to Dominate Your World.”

Welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about these major developments, David Dayen. Explain exactly what Libra is and what Facebook is trying to do.

DAVID DAYEN: So, Libra, as Facebook describes it, is a currency, a cryptocurrency. When you talk about that, you kind of think of something like bitcoin. But this would actually have reserves, so they call it sort of a stable coin. It is backed by actual money that is various international currencies and also government securities. And so, that should prevent volatility from the unit of exchange, Libra, going up or down very much. It will fluctuate a little, but not in the ways that, you know, we think of when we think of bitcoin. So, according to Facebook, that is the way that this can be used to purchase goods on the Facebook app or on any other app or website that offers payment in Libra. It’s a way to transfer money to other people on the Facebook app. Obviously, you know, we have, what, over 2 billion people that use Facebook. It’s a way to transfer something of value between those users. And because it’s backed by international currencies and can be used across borders, it’s really supplanting the need to exchange money. You don’t have to go from dollars to euros, necessarily; you can just pay in Libra. So, that’s sort of the pitch that Facebook would make.

The other side of this is that there’s no real regulatory setup. It’s displacing global currencies in some ways. There are serious monetary policy concerns, serious regulatory concerns. Could this be used to facilitate money laundering or tax evasion? There are a whole host of unanswered questions around this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, David Dayen, this whole issue of a bunch of private companies, because we’re not talking just about Facebook. They initiated it, but they’ve gotten a buy-in from credit card companies, from PayPal, from Uber, from a variety of very powerful companies, mostly American companies. And you’re, in essence, creating a private organization to run a money system that would stretch across borders. I spent a couple of hours going on their website yesterday, trying to understand even the governance situation of this, and it’s very detailed. They’ve been working on this, obviously, for quite some time in secret. And they talk about creating a Libra Association Council, where if you were going to be a founding member, you have to invest at least $10 million, and supposedly no one company could control this council, because you’d be limited to a 1% voting share, no matter how much money you invested. But if you invest a lot of money, you can designate universities or nonprofits to vote for you on this council. So, in effect, the more money you invest, even though you may not have direct power over how the association functions, you can still have enormous influence on the voting blocs of what would in essence be a new international currency. I’m wondering what—

DAVID DAYEN: Yeah, I mean—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What are regulators going to say about this?

DAVID DAYEN: Yeah, there are serious governance questions around it. There are also, you know, financial questions. I mean, the way that this works, as I understand it, is there’s this investment of $10 million from up to a hundred companies, so you’re talking about a billion dollars. And also, all the money—so, if somebody buys Libra, they’re paying that money into this reserve, and they get Libra back. That money can be used to be invested, these reserves, Facebook says, in very low-risk securities, but that money is not returned to the individual. So, if you think about a bank, you get interest on your money that you deposit with the bank, that the bank can use for any purpose that they wish. In this case, the interest stays with these companies. So, you know, there’s a financial incentive for these companies to get involved in this.

And if you think about the scale, the potential scale of something like this, where you’re talking about 2 billion users, any—this is almost an operating system for money. Any other organization can build something to create payment services in this fashion. The possibilities are really endless, and so, you know, the financial possibilities are also endless. And as you correctly cite, Juan, I mean, the governance questions of how this currency will be managed, how capital flows will be understood and facilitated, if you have a country that is experiencing an economic downturn and—Libra is an excellent way for capital flight, which is something we don’t really want when a country is in financial trouble. How is that going to be mitigated or managed? There are just, as I said, just way too many unanswered questions with this.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about the issue, for instance, of countries that may be in conflict with each other—the United States and Iran right now or the United States and Venezuela? The impact of this kind of a currency on the geopolitical conflicts and the ability of nations to control their own currencies?

DAVID DAYEN: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to know how sanctions would work under this setup. It’s hard to know how any kind of anti-money-laundering—usually a bank would have to create some suspicious activity report. Will Libra be able to do that? You know, you could use this for ways to harm other countries through removing that currency into Libra. I mean, that would obviously be done at the individual level. But, you know, usually, as you say, countries are in control of their own fiat currency. And if they have this sort of safety valve, this global currency that would displace them in some ways, which an individual could use to make all the purchases that it needs to make, and not use the currency denominated in that particular country, it’s almost unknown. I mean, we’d have no precedent for this. So, it’s hard to say what some of the implications would be. And I think that’s why regulators and politicians are asking to really slow down, so this can sort of be studied.

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Four industries Big Tech has ruined

Keith A. Spencer / Salon

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Google, Apple, and the Saudi wife-tracking app

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also soc media:

Even in the wake of a recent mixed earning report and volatile stock prices, Netflix remains the media success story of the decade. The company, whose user base has grown rapidly, now boasts almost 150 million global subscribers.

But as someone who studies the television industry, I’ve always wondered how Netflix can provide so much unlimited ad-free content for such a low monthly rate, which currently averages around US$14.

After all, didn’t MoviePass just fall apart using a similar model of offering ad-free content for a monthly subscription fee? And Netflix is burning through cash, with negative cash flow of $3 billion in 2018 alone.

What if we’re looking at Netflix through the wrong lens? What if its primary long-term business model is not as a media content or distribution company, but as a data aggregation company?

Seeing Netflix this way might better explain its current strategy and clue us into the company’s future plans, while raising red flags about ethics and privacy.

Spending more and charging less

For a century of screen entertainment, there were only a few ways for Americans to pay for media:

You could purchase a book, album or DVD, “lease” a movie theater seat or rent a tape at a video store;
You could pay with your attention by consuming ads alongside “free” radio or television programming;
Or you could subscribe to cable TV, and pay a large monthly fee to access an array of scheduled programming.

Netflix doesn’t follow any of these three models. Instead it most resembles HBO’s subscription service, which similarly provides ad-free original programming alongside a library of older content for a monthly fee.

While they may seem analogous, there are key differences. HBO is part of a larger media company, which gives it access to vast content libraries. And even though HBO charges more than Netflix, it spends far less for original content. In 2017, HBO spent $2.5 billion to Netflix’s $8 billion. The latter’s spending grew to $13 billion in 2018.

Relying on subscribers, not ads

Pouring money into content might generate hits, but not direct profits: Netflix’s sole revenue stream is subscriptions, so its primary goal is to gain and retain subscribers. Having popular content generates buzz, and Netflix hypes its brand by using self-reported numbers to claim that its original films and series like “Bird Box” and “Sex Education” attract millions of viewers. Yet Netflix only yields the same monthly fee per household, regardless of how much subscribers watch.

This makes Netflix distinct from other media companies that use highly profitable hits to generate revenue. This will then subsidize the production of new films, television shows, albums and video games.

Meanwhile, competing streaming platforms Hulu and Amazon Prime Video have other revenue sources – advertising and retail, respectively – and their larger diversified companies can better leverage hits.

Netflix needs to produce and acquire desirable content to make the service indispensable. But making original content is expensive. Hiring talent and producing movies and television series costs the company more than $15 billion annually. Netflix spends much more cash than it brings in, leading to consistent negative cash flow and a mountain of debt that amounts to more than $10 billion.

Even though it reported a record $1.2 billion in profit in 2018, those profits are based on an accounting model that ignores many costs and debts. This has led some financial analysts, like NYU professor Aswath Damodaran, to believe that Netflix’s business model is unsustainable.

“The more Netflix grows,” he wrote last fall, “the more its costs grow and the more money it burns. I’m not sure how it’s ever going to turn that around.”

So with only one stable, inflexible revenue source, how might Netflix’s business model become more sustainable?

More analogous to Facebook?

One theory is that Netflix is playing the long game, pitting itself against social media companies like Facebook and YouTube, rather than just film studios or TV networks.

Media commentator Matthew Ball argues that Netflix is in a race with the social media giants to occupy “every minute of leisure time available.”

Yet Netflix’s financial model is the inverse of Facebook’s and YouTube’s. The social media giants generate huge advertising revenues from free, user-generated content. Perhaps Netflix could balance content costs with higher subscription fees and its growing global user base. It seems unlikely, however, that this model could lead to anything beyond small profit margins.

But what if the parallel between Netflix and Facebook runs deeper than cost and revenue?

From its inception as a DVD rental service, Netflix has touted its competitive advantage through its algorithm – the predictive engine that claims to deliver the most user-specific content from its vast library. Netflix has always been a technology firm first and foremost, invested in mining its library of vast user data to deliver what viewers want to watch.

For instance, the Netflix engineering team strives “to have customers click on a show in the first 10 seconds.” Such obsessive interface tweaking helps promote programming – as Ball notes, “the most valuable real estate in the world is the top fold of Netflix home page.” But it doesn’t generate revenue.

This emphasis on viewing optimization, internal promotion and maximizing engagement resonates with another recent Netflix offering: the “Black Mirror” episode “Bandersnatch.” Netflix’s highest-profile experiment in interactive narrative, “Bandersnatch” allows viewers to choose how the story unfolds from dozens of options.

Netflix collects data from viewers of “Bandersnatch,” charting the narrative choices they made during the episode. Such viewer activity feeds into Netflix’s tracking efforts that it uses to make programming decisions and customize promotion to each subscriber.

A logical next step would be product integration. Based on your choices within the narrative around specific brand names, Netflix could then sell customized micro-targeted product placements within programs – a strategy that could actually lead to increased revenue.

A data gold mine?

Based on all we know about Silicon Valley’s aggressive monetization of user data, what else could Netflix do, beyond product integration, with this valuable information?

Netflix logs everything you have ever watched and how you watch – every time you pause, what programs you consider watching but choose not to and when you’re most likely to binge on “Friends” reruns.

When linked to website trackers, Netflix could, for example, cross-reference that viewing data with your social media accounts, your purchasing habits, your search history and even your emails.

In the age of surveillance capitalism, such data could be worth a fortune to marketers, political campaigns and advertisers.

As far as we know, Netflix has not started using its data to track us online, package us to marketers or cross-reference our private messages (even though Facebook has provided Netflix access to this information). And I doubt Netflix will violate its core brand by incorporating ads into its interface. Partnering with or acquiring a marketing firm to suffuse every subscriber’s online experiences with micro-targeted ads seems more likely.

All of these potential uses of viewing data are still speculative. But since profits regularly eclipse tech companies’ ethical standards, it’s important to be asking these questions before, rather than after, the damage is done.

the conv 419

https://onezero.medium.com/how-ayn-rand-bridges-silicon-valley-billionaires-and-fossil-fuel-moguls-6735765be18

In 1989, Bill McKibben?—?then a journalist who had recently quit a five-year stint at the New Yorker?—?published a landmark environmental text called The End of Nature. One of the first books to attract mainstream attention to the subject of climate change, The End of Nature warned that human materialism and the exploitation of natural resources would be disastrously harmful to the planet.

Thirty years later, McKibben has become one of America’s most renowned climate change activists, and he’s out with a new book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? While The End of Nature focused on the impact of climate change on our physical planet, Falter explores what these changes will mean for the humans who live here. McKibben is interested in the fate of what he calls the “human game”?—?“the sum total of culture and commerce and politics; of religion and sport and social life; of dance and music; of dinner and art and cancer and sex and Instagram.”

Falter is a sprawling book, but it leans on two distinct lenses through which we can understand our future: climate change and the rise of artificial intelligence. McKibben tells OneZero that we’re “well past the point where we can stop climate change,” but with enough effort, we can slow it down. We’re currently doing a bad job of that: Last year, carbon emissions rose by 3.4%, the largest annual jump since 2010. McKibben explores how we arrived at our current predicament, and his diagnosis echoes an increasingly mainstream conclusion: Since the Reagan years, the wealthy and politically powerful have been fueling global warming at the expense of the rest of us.

McKibben is generally skeptical of “Big Tech” and certain technologies currently in development. He’s concerned that while computers may be able to perform some tasks “better” than we can, it’s important to preserve “the experience of being human?—?which is precisely the thing that’s disappearing.” But he’s not a tech pessimist, either. He’s hopeful that avoiding the dangers of automation “is at least possible,” and he says that “watching the rapid spread of a technology as world-changing as the solar panel cheers me daily.”

Falter doesn’t reveal much new science. In fact, McKibben argues that the science of climate change has been agreed upon?—?and ignored?—?for decades. Now, McKibben insists, it’s time for collective action. The climate activist group he helped found, 350.org, has been doing just that around flash points like the Keystone pipeline protests. Most recently, 350.org has turned its attention to the fossil fuel divestment movement.

OneZero caught up with McKibben to discuss Falter, the dangers of libertarian philosophy, and how to stand up to wealth and power in the fight to slow climate change.

OneZero: Americans may be aware of all the facts about climate change, yet, as you write, “we’ve gone on more or less as usual. We literally don’t want to hear about it.” How do we combat apathy?

Bill McKibben: So, the problem is not that people don’t understand that we face real danger from climate change. Increasingly, people really get that, and Mother Nature is doing her best to make the case year after year. The polling shows that after the fires in California, we seem to have reached a kind of new movement of climate consensus?—?that something needs to be done. The problem is that people have a hard time imagining what it is we’re going to do. Or imagining that anything they could do would be large enough to matter. And truthfully, as individuals, that’s kind of true. I mean, I have solar panels all over the roof of my house, and I’m proud of them, but I don’t try to fool myself that they are how we’re going to stop climate change.

What we’ve tried to do is build movements big enough to let people feel there’s a plausible chance of actually getting something done. And these movements are achieving victories. Whether they’re going to work or not, I can’t tell you.

You write that “we need to understand what drives [those in power]. We need to diagnose the intellectual and spiritual hookworm that has entered their bodies and attached itself to their brains.” What is your diagnosis?

Look, I think our society has gotten dangerously out of balance. You can tell by the fact that the temperature is going up and the gap between rich and poor is even wider. I don’t think the people at the top are ever going to do anything about it, not unless those of us who aren’t at the top force them to.

If you look at the Democratic presidential contenders, there are two people talking about the need for real redistribution and rebalancing of power, but it’s not going to come easily, because the people in control, the very rich and powerful, have the resources to stay in control. They’ve figured out how to game our political system in all kinds of ways. There’s no shortcut around people getting together to demand change.

You devote a hefty chunk of the book to the influence of Ayn Rand, saying that she’s arguably the most “important political philosopher of our time,” and “when the United States was occupying the role of superpower, charting the course for a planet, she was occupying the hearts and minds of many of its most powerful people.” How is her free market ideology related to climate change?

So, it’s just the wrong moment in American history and world history [for us to follow the principles of Ayn Rand]?—?the ideology that markets solve all problems, that we should leave the rich alone. When I say “worst moment,” it’s because over the past 30 years, from the Reagan era on, we could have done something about climate change, but we didn’t. We were locked into the belief that a free market economy was somehow going to do it on its own. It clearly hasn’t.

That idea—that selfishness was all we needed, that greed was good—simply turns out to be incorrect.

You also argue that although “the tech billionaires who inhabit Silicon Valley aren’t at all like the fossil fuel moguls and assorted other magnates who celebrated Trump’s rise to power,” Ayn Rand is the “one human being that bridges the cultural gulf between different species of plutocrat.”

If you start reading the biographies of [tech moguls like Elon Musk, Travis Kalanick, Peter Thiel]?—?and they’re almost all guys?—?Ayn Rand is one of the few commonalities. People who have made a whole lot of money and don’t want to be bothered in any way find her enormously appealing. And that’s why there’s an awful lot of yachts on this planet named The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I mean, these guys are usually social progressives. They just don’t want anyone telling them what to do.

And we’ve now seen how that works out. I mean, people have used Facebook to rig elections, massacre racial minorities. Finally, 10 years too late, Mark Zuckerberg is saying, “Well, maybe we need some regulation here to help us get things under control.” But that’s precisely the opposite of what they were saying for a long time, when the slogan was “move fast and break things.”

It broke a lot of things, including, in many ways, the politics of this country.

One of the absolute side effects of turning people into products is that they become obsolete, which is new for human beings.

...

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are quietly helping Big Oil destroy the climate

So much for Google's slogan, "Don't be evil."

JOE ROMM

FEB 28, 2019, 11:59 AM

https://thinkprogress.org/amazon-google-microsoft-oil-climate-b8b1dd15f115/

A protest from Microsoft to use clean energy in cloud computing at Tel Aviv, April 22, 2012 . CREDIT: JACK GUEZ/AFP/GettyImages.

A PROTEST FROM MICROSOFT TO USE CLEAN ENERGY IN CLOUD COMPUTING AT TEL AVIV, APRIL 22, 2012 . CREDIT: JACK GUEZ/AFP/GETTYIMAGES.

ExxonMobil and Microsoft announced last week that they are partnering in the “largest-ever oil and gas” deal to use cloud computing, which the corporations say will boost production up to 50,000 barrels of oil per day by 2025.

Microsoft likes to tout how it’s running its operations on 100 percent renewable energy and embracing the Paris climate agreement. The company’s founder, Bill Gates, also portrays himself as a champion of climate action.

But the tech giant is working overtime to close deals with the world’s biggest oil companies to help them boost fossil fuel production using the latest information technology, such as cloud computing, which enables companies to capture, store, and analyze vast amounts of data in real time.

And Microsoft isn’t alone. Many of the most well-known tech giants we think of as green and sustainable — including Amazon and Google — are helping the dirtiest polluters increase production of climate-destroying fossil fuels, as Gizmodo’s Brian Merchant has pointed out.

Lawmakers declare war on the biggest civil rights

problem you’ve probably never heard of

So while these tech giants tout their public support for the Paris climate agreement, they are working to undermine its central achievement — that the world’s nations unanimously agreed to leave most of the world’s fossil fuels in the ground. Preserving a livable climate requires heroic efforts to slash fossil fuel use, not cynical efforts to produce even more.

In Historic Paris Climate Deal, World Unanimously Agrees To Not Burn Most Fossil Fuels]

“These actions by these so-called responsible actors on climate illustrate the futility in relying on corporations to act to address climate change,” environmental sociologist Robert Brulle told ThinkProgress in an email. “Profitability, not any concern about the planet and its future, drives their actions.”

For instance, Google launched a new oil, gas, and energy division in 2018 “to court the oil and gas industry,” the Wall Street Journal reported last summer. It’s headed by Darryl Willis, who worked at BP for nearly three decades. And it has already made deals with oil giants like Anadarko Petroleum and France’s Total, and oilfield services companies like Schlumberger and Baker Hughes.

In September, Google announced a major deal with a Houston energy investment bank. The goal of this partnership is to “cut costs in the wake of the oil bust and remain competitive as electric vehicles and renewable power sources gain market share,” according to The Houston Chronicle.

In short, Google is helping dirty energy compete with clean energy.

“Google’s motto was once ‘Don’t Be Evil,'” leading climatologist Michael Manntold ThinkProgress in an email. “It appears they’ve dropped the ‘Don’t.’ It is time for them to cease and desist in serving as enablers of climate destruction.”

U.S. Companies Publicly Support Climate Action, Privately Fund Deniers

Ironically, when Google was criticized last month by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez(D-NY) and Chellie Pingree (D-ME) for supporting a conference promoting climate science denial, a Google spokesperson replied, “Google has long been a leader in sustainability. Since 2007, we have operated as a carbon neutral company and in 2017, we reached 100 percent renewable energy for our global operations.”

Google clearly has a different definition of “leader in sustainability” and “carbon neutral company” if it includes helping Big Oil produce more climate-destroying, carbon-intensive fossil fuels.

Finally, Amazon Web Services, the largest provider of cloud computing in the world, has its own “Oil & Gas” division. Amazon promises it can help Big Oil “unleash innovation to optimize production and profitability.” It already does work with GE’s oil business and oil giants like Royal Dutch Shell and BP.

Those hoping the tech giants would help lead the world into a carbon-free future based on their climate-friendly press releases and renewable energy purchases, will need to look elsewhere for true climate action leadership.

As Brulle put it, these companies care about profits more than the planet — they will never be the answer to our climate crisis. “To have real action on climate change requires strong government action to break our reliance on fossil fuels,” he said.

---

Do Facebook and Google need to be broken up?

Matthew Rozsa / Salon

The unprecedented power of these tech giants to manipulate and shape discourse may be impeding our democracies.

EXTRACTION:

rw radio often use fda loophole to hustle vit/diet supplements; preys on magical thinking; MLM is odd hybrid see below of individuality , but leaches off personal network; UBER extracts via car, AIRBNB personal space. Capitalism extract natural world resources, FANG of digital world.

Regarding the prosperity gospel, Fea cites the work of historian Kate Bowler, writing, “Prosperity preachers teach that faith in God combined with positive thinking and an optimistic attitude will ultimately lead to monetary wealth, good health, and victory over the difficult circumstances of life.” His broader background descriptions are adequate, but his focus on one figure, Paula White, who has a long history with Trump, is not fleshed out much.

:{:{}:

Fea mentions but does not elaborate on Trump’s youthful experience hearing sermons from Norman Vincent Peale, author of “The Power of Positive Thinking,” and never delves into how Trump’s own business practices have reflected the influence of such figures, such as this 2011 New York magazine story about Trump’s multi-level vitamin marketing scheme.The prosperity gospel is the utmost in individualism, while at the same time relying on a powerful and persuasive social environment, which Fea’s analysis does not include.

---

https://www.alternet.org/heres-why-platforms-tumblr-are-totalitarian-threat

On December 17, when microblogging site Tumblr instituted its nudity ban, thousands of sex workers — many of whom did cam-work remotely for clients — spontaneously lost a major source of income. There is a particularly Kafkaesque echo to the social media site’s decision: Certainly, no one likes feeling like a cog in the vast machinations of an incomprehensibly large, uncaring corporation. And yet, such a sensation has become the norm among Silicon Valley’s platforms, who have amassed such immense power over our lives that their ivory tower decisions can have sweeping repercussions for millions, spontaneously and seemingly randomly thrusting any one of us into poverty overnight.

Long before Tumblr’s C-suite decided to go full Protestant, similar situations occurred at other digital platform sites. When San Francisco–based Uber lowers the base fare for its global workforce of millions of drivers, a worker in Mumbai suddenly suffers. And when the engineers at Facebook in Menlo Park decide to toy with the algorithm that determines who and what you see in your Timeline, the reduction in visibility is felt by a small family business in Cairo.

There is something innately absurd about this undemocratic, totalitarian arrangement: it can make one’s success (or failure) feel utterly arbitrary, as if we were all mere puppets driven by randomly-changing algorithms. And yet, for the corporate imaginations who set the decrees, there is a Machiavellian logic at work driven by — what else? — profit.

Social media corporations like Tumblr, Facebook and Instagram are interested in keeping us glued to their sites, regardless of the social repercussions.One might argue that all companies attempt to get consumers habituated to their products; yet social media’s influence in our lives is personal and intrusive in a way that few industries have ever been before. "Your telephone in the 1970s didn’t have a thousand engineers on the other side of the telephone [who were] updating the way your telephone worked every day to be more and more persuasive," digital ethicist Tristan Harris explained in a CBS interview.

Nowadays, social media literally categorizes, manages, and controls our relationships with friends and confidants. In the process, it affects what we see of their lives, the emotions we feel and receive, and the information we are fed. In this regard, the social media industry is far more intimate than the newspaper industry; more manipulative than the beauty industry; and more precise in its targeting than television. And now, for many bloggers, marketers, newspapers, businesses and — yes — sex workers, it is also the hand that feeds them.

Why, then, do these sites all undergo spontaneous algorithm changes that alienate vast swaths of their userbase?Again, the answer has to do with eyeballs and thus profit. Facebook constantly refines its algorithms to keep users on its site as long as possible, and solicits feedback "so that you spend more time using the service — thus seeing more of the ads that provide most of the company’s revenue," as Harris said. This is standard practice for social media companies. In the recent case of Tumblr, insiders hint that the company wants to keep itself from liability in the wake of the draconian FOSTA/SESTA Act, which criminalizes those who host anyone who could be potentially involved in child trafficking — an intentionally broad category that has inadvertently criminalized much mutually consensual sex work, too.

Uber drivers, online magazines and sex workers all have in common that they might feel as though they are pawns in an apparatus controlled by an unseen elite. When Facebook suddenly changed its Timeline algorithm last year, thousands of news sites saw their traffic drop dramatically — resulting in a sudden dip in advertising dollars. Facebook made the decision because its industrial psychologists figured out that people stay more engaged (read: spend more time on the site) if they see their friends' posts, rather than the posts of news sites or magazines that they might follow. Of course, as a for-profit, unaccountable corporation, Facebook can do as it pleases, with no regard for the hundreds of journalists suddenly out of a job. These sites and apps may be virtual, but the social harm and misery they inflict is real.

Aside from vulnerable sex workers, journalists have long been the canary in the coal mine for engineer tinkering on said platforms. Franklin Foer, the former editor of the New Republic, quit his job in protest after witnessing the magazine's new owner — a Facebook co-founder named Chris Hughes — capitulate to the social media companies, whom Hughes believed they were reliant on for clicks and therefore revenue. In becoming dependent on social media companies, Foer argues, the New Republic — like many other media outlets — essentially devolved to epitomize the opaque values and beliefs of the social media gatekeepers who controlled its revenue streams. The situation at The New Republic "became a small parable for journalism," Foer told me in an interview. "Journalism was coming to depend much more on both Google and Facebook." Foer argues that this is dependence is dangerous inasmuch as "Facebook’s values and Google’s values end up becoming the values of media that depends on them."

Foer’s observation from years of working in journalism is that the utopian rhetoric of Silicon Valley is often used as a rationale to explain why their business decisions are inherently good for humanity. This circular reasoning helps shield the tech industry from criticism. As Foer explained to me:

[Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg] has described Facebook [as] being like a government. It sets policies. I think that he has generally had a vision of where he wants to lead his users. [The] idea of sharing, [is] so deeply embedded in Facebook; [Zuckerberg] wants the people who use Facebook to become more sharing [= MOVING DATA]individuals. This is consistent with one of the big values at Silicon Valley, which is transparency; Silicon Valley believes in the religion of transparency. So one way in which [Zuckerberg] justified Facebook is that it causes people to be more transparent. They expose more of their lives to their friends and to their family, and they expose their views, they expose where they go to holiday, and that this is going to make us ultimately better human beings.... I mean, really, in my view, they have a set of ideals, but they also have a business model. They end up reconfiguring your ideals in order to justify their business model.

So something like video is a good example. Facebook has decided recently that video is the thing that’s going to make them a lot of money. So their algorithm then elevates video. If I open my Facebook feed, it shows one video after another. A lot of it is just silly and kind of garbage that you don’t understand why it’s there at the top of your feed. That’s their decision. It’ll come up with some ex post facto rationale for why video will make us better human beings.

You can say this about many of said platforms, that they use the self-serving utopian rhetoric of Silicon Valley to essentially justify their technocratic, undemocratic decisions. Ultimately, the social and economic repercussions of the tech industry’s algorithm changes radiate out across the globe.

This is all to say that we’ve reached a point where the power wielded by said platforms has few analogues in history. An errant piece of code or an intentional Facebook Timeline change has an instant, damning effect on so many lives. Such an arrangement speaks to the totalitarian nature of Silicon Valley: the eggheads who know best make the rules, and the rest of us — whether magazine, sex worker or Uber driver — are just grist for the digital mill.

# #

Adapted from "A People’s History of Silicon Valley: How the Tech Industry Exploits Workers, Erodes Privacy and Undermines Democracy,” by Keith A. Spencer, available now from major booksellers. © 2018 Eyewear Publishing.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?449535-1/communicators-scott-galloway

7/18

New York University Professor Scott Gallowaytalks about his book The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. He discussed what he calls the four most powerful companies in the world and their impact on our lives.

The United States, like other great powers, does not pursue humanitarian objectives. It pursues objectives determined by power considerations, and they lead to different positions with regard to the Kurds or others at different times.

On the imminent dangers of Big Tech

If you read a major newspaper, say the New York Times, you get a certain range of opinion. It’s narrow. It’s basically centrist to far right, but at least it’s a range of opinion. Those who are more addicted to social media tend to turn directly to what supports their own views, not to hear other things, that’s not a good thing. Google, Facebook and the rest, those are commercial institutions. Their constituency is basically advertisers, and they would like to establish the kinds of controls over their consumers that will be beneficial to [a] business model that enabled them to get advertising. That has very serious distorting effects. And we know that they provide massive information to the corporate system, which they use in their own efforts to try to shape and control behavior and opinion. All of these are dangerous developments. The power of these private corporations to direct people in particular [is] a serious problem which requires considerable thought and attention.

Listen to the interview on the Intercepted podcast or read a copy of its transcript here.

GAFA FANG

What is an oligarchy?

Modern oligarchies

What about the United States and Australia?

Related

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Journalist Franklin Foer tackles Silicon Valley’s “sham populism”

All in the family

Checks and balances

Ayn Rand and the myth of the superhuman founder

Bad for companies, bad for democracy

All in the family

Checks and balances

Ayn Rand and the myth of the superhuman founder

Bad for companies, bad for democracy

Ralph Nader ranks the infinite greed, power and controls of giant corporations

Microsoft, Amazon, and PayPal Executives All Have Seats on the Boards of Police Foundations

New research shows tech companies’ police involvement goes way beyond their products

Sarah Emerson

Jun 18

Always Day One

The Information Trade

After Words with Rana Foroohar

Kansas City Star editorial board blasts Missouri Republican for bill aimed at big tech companies: ‘A dangerous assault on the First Amendment’

Four industries Big Tech has ruined

Spending more and charging less

Relying on subscribers, not ads

More analogous to Facebook?

A data gold mine?

Do Facebook and Google need to be broken up?

# #