The next presidential election will be fiercely contested and the country will be very split, as split as it was in the Bush-Gore election of 2000. Obama was able to come to power after years of conservativism because conservatives changed their vote, but the Democratic senator from Illinois was able to capture the whole nation because of the emerging tool of Twitter and Facebook and other Internet sites and the determination of the emerging Silicon Valley Internet companies to get a president favourable to their agenda.
Their agenda wasn't even entirely coherent to themselves, but they were moved first by the instinct for self-preservation, like all beasts, and tended to pick the issues that would sustain them -- any bill protecting intellectual property would hit hard against their established "California Business Model" of free accounts, free uploads of copyrighted material, selling of ads with that hijacked material, hiding behind the "safe harbour" concept of no accountability for encouraging and indulging such behaviour, then play "catch me if you can" with separate DMCA takedown notices filed one after another by intellectua property owners.
Then continue through other topics -- some on foreign policy, such as being friendly to China, so that Silicon Valley's back end -- the gadget and parts manufacturers in China -- could stay safe. Liberal immigration laws -- so that Indian programmers who take lower wages could come into the country and also to provide start-up entrepreneurs with incentives to come to the US (policies I happen to be for, but not everyone is).
Silicon Valley may not have started out with taking on the question of abortion -- but today, when the breast-cancer foundation Komen decided to suspend funding to Planned Parenthood, which provides abortions, "the Internet" (as it likes to call itself) was ready to take down Komen with massive amounts of hateful blog posts, even hacking of Komen's site. The tools for this mob attack were ready, willing and available, well out of their "beta phase" by now -- and not a single Silicon Valley executive arched an eyebrow. The "netizens" were on the move.
Fast-forward four years later, and you see that while Obama himself is threatened in part by a backlash of his own making as Republicans stormed the House in state elections, "the Internet"lobby of Silicon Valley, the tech press, and millions of micro-bloggers on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr have had resounding political successes, completely over-riding Congress as it sought to pass two bills to protect intellectual property -- the Stop Online PiracyAct and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (SOPA/PIPA). By literally going on strike and blacking out pages for the day upon right millions have come to rely, like Wikipedia, Silicon Valley flexed its muscles hard -- and in ways that some "thought leaders" were given pause, such as David Pogue of The New York Times, part of the enthusiastic tech press that helps Silicon Valley sell the gadgets (and rarely criticize them).
Silicon Valley lobbyists (it wasn't a grassroots effort, the grassroots were whipped by the companies and their elitist bloggers, the netroots) marshalled the troops with hysterical hypotheticals making it seem as if every teenager who uploaded a copyrighted music video or put a link on his Tumblr blog was going to be responsible for the entire website being taken down.
The result of the most massive and rapid lobbying operation in history -- using the particular accelerating and amplifying tools of social media -- is that Congress didn't vote on the bills, they simply postponed them, and many believe they are now basically dead, while Congress limps back to try to "fix them," i.e. eviscerate them to prevent erosion of Google's business model (upload first, chase with DMCA takedowns later).
That's scary, when our elected representatives don't get to even vote on bills they draft, but are silenced by mobsters who are no less forceful and unaccountable just because they come in modern cyber clothing.
Even more scary, having "the Internet" in the palm of its hand, two leading companies who led the anti-SOPA charge, Twitter and Google, went on within a week of their victory over Congress (not victory in Congress but over Congress) to impose censorship-by-country, enabling authoritarian governments to request that people tweeting in their country have their tweets removed and made invisible in that country.They didn't bother to get any bill through congress or make sure that they were consistent with an existing Internet Freedom act on the floor -- they just did it. They are big enough. They are bigger than countries. They can do what they want.
While some human rights groups like Amnesty International and the Reporters Without Borders spoke up in criticism of this undemocratic action by Twitter and Google, tech activists and academic commentators like Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the social media academic Zeynep Tufecki and Alex Howard, the O'Reilly lobbyists in Washington applauded the move as "transparent" and "providing tools for activists" because the accounts being blocked would be visible on an EFF-run site "Chilling Effects" (this would help EFF's cause of tracking and exposing calls for blocking of unlawfully posted copyrighted material, and would then enable the bullying of any company who filed such DMCA notices.)
So outrageously, these social media gurus had had led the charge on SOPA, claiming falsely that it was "censorship" were now not only strangely tone-deaf to real censorship with real-world governments now occurring with their beloved platforms, they were crafting philosophical positions that helped justify this unconscionable action on the part of the platforms.
Now let's look at the next round in the struggle for Silicon Valley and its related networks to take over the elections.
There's no question that Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc. are going to want Obama as president, not only because the developers tilt to the liberal and left persuasion but because they will want to ensure that they seal their non-democratic victories overthrowing Congress on SOPA (millions of people not writing to their congress people to urge them to vote a certain way, but millions of people getting Congress not even to put the bills up for a vote!).
So they will invest even more heavily in making their existing tools available for political empowerment of themselves (and speak airily as if they are "empowering" their customers) by controlling the ads and search results they see -- with its new "privacy" policy, Google now owns you across all its properties and you must use your real name to post your political views on Google+ -- and it watches your every search and every gmail communication and ties it to those views expressed on its new geek-dominated but millions-strong social network G+.
An entire separate discussion could be held about how these platforms, with their pre-fixed tribes of "thought leaders" and their friends who were their earliest beta testers and "recommended" accounts now have mouthpieces with the most followers -- and mouthpieces who can mute and ban any critic. I'm going to return to documenting how this can happen with a few field cases of my own soon.
Here's my prediction about the 2012 elections: Obama will win not because he really has over 50 percent of the nation's voters, but because the amplification and whipsawing effect of "the Internet" will throw the vote. The vast array of tools available now for online "thought-leaders", bullies, e-thugs in the storm-trooper hackers called "Anonymous" -- all of these will be used to do "whatever they have to do by any means". If you thought the Anonymous-backed Occupy Wall Street was annoying during the primaries in Iowa and other states, you haven't seen anything yet.
How could this be if social media is "neutral"? The Tea Party is on Twitter, right? Many people are disenchanted with Obama, many would prefer to move back to the Republican Party or more undecided will now be drawn to Mitt Romney, the likely Republican candidate. There will be massive agitation for both candidates on social media, which will be a deciding factor (the 2 million-strong audience of Fox TV will be drowned out, and all the cries of "Orwell" made by the insecure "progressives" like Bill Moyers will be revealed as ridiculous).
Yet even while in theory "both sides" get to use social media, social media is not neutral. There are no major tech-backed social-media visible figures of the right or even center. The "progressives" rule the ways. Silicon Valley has every tech leader from Scoble to Dan Gillmor to Jeff Jarvis to Cory Doctrow to the all-powerful Joi Ito on its side articulating the "progressive" views of the platformistas. Who is on the other side? Me? Please name me any figure of the center or right, who will support a Republican candidate, who has a more than 296,000 followers like Google Ideas Council on Foreign Relations fellow Jared Cohen or even 46,000 like former Obama White House spokesman PJ Crowley or 22,000 former Policy & Planning head at State like Anne-Marie Slaughter. Well?
Michelle Malkin has 223,000 -- but that's significantly below Cohen, and there aren't the figures on the right that are the equivalents of Crowly or Slaughter (if you can refute this, please do, I'm not seeing it.) Social media works in clusters, as one or two thought leaders tweet and idea and get their hordes of followers to retweet them. They then get a sounding-board first on the middle-level leaders with the 20,000 or 50,000 level, then those at the higher levels. Twitter is really broadcasting of the one-to-many, just arranged on the Plotinus principle of cascading levels of worlds -- *hardly anybody talks back, they just dutifully talk back*.
How did it get to be this way? Activism of any kind tends to be liberal and leftist activism -- conservatives tend not to get active as they preserve institutions and the status quo -- the Tea Party radicalism isn't new in American politics, but it isn't so typical, either, and has been overshadowed by the far more radical leftist/anarchist Occupy Wall Street in many cities.
Social media is already pre-packed with partisan thought leaders in a number of ways:
o the devs are "better worlders" and "progressives" or at least tilt toward liberalism. While some old Silicon Valley companies may have Republicans as leaders or board members, new social media companies most certainly do not.
o the beta test device ensures that these devs first put in their like-minded friends into the service first, so that they get a head start adding friends and followers -- on Twitter, power-users got to use scripts to make those additions before the devs did two things: a) banned those automatic scripts b) put in a ceiling of 2,000 for people you follow yourself until you yourself fit a secret algorithm -- as more people follow you, you can then follow others. Since the main way you get followers is by followering other people who follow you back, this keeps many people trapped under the 2,000 threshold and invisible on Twitter services for ever.
o Twitter recommends people to follow to new members -- and these include many of their power bloggers in the tech field
o Twitter enables the tweet that is retweeted the most times during any important event to remain on top, and thereby get even more followers because it's in the view (This is hugely annoying when you're trying to follow fresh news in emergency but it ensures the Twitter thought leaders get to shape every single major event, for ever).
o Google's algorithms enable Wikipedia to occur almost always as the top search result on any term, and Wikipedia of course is part of the "progressive" Silicon Valley lobby (their page blackout had the most public resonance as millions of teenagers doing their homework came to hate and vilify Congress as an institution in the mistaken, whipped-up hysterical belief that it was going to "black out" Internet pages like Wikipedia (which supposedly would be taken down by SOPA if infringing content was found on any one of them -- absurd and not at all possible with this bill).
o On Google+ and to some extent Facebook, thought leaders can mute and block or remove the posts of any critics, ensuring that their "broadcast field" for legions of re-posters is unimpeded and clear to resonate only with their own agenda. They can also count on fiercely loyal fanboyz and fangirlz who will browbeat critics on their own and hound them off the comments if they can't achieve this on their own with the platform's tools.
There's more that has to do with the role of muting and blocking by these people and how search works, but this is enough to explain what we're dealing with going into these elections.
Roughly speaking, the left owns social media, and the right owns some TV and radio stations. The left will win.
Recent Comments