Alec Ross, State Department's
"innovation" guy and Tweeter-in-chief, speaking at the "The Project
[R]evolution Digital and Social Media Conference" (*gag*) in New
Zealand. Photo by US Embassy in NZ, 2012.
Well, not quite -- he's on his last foreign trip, and it's his last week in the job of Senior Innovator at the State Department.
Alec Ross -- who has never been on a Google+ Hangout, just to keep the record straight -- is leaving public service.
And he's taking his 300,000+ followers with him. After all, his Twitter account formed more than two years ago is just in his own name, it's not the name of a generic office.
And that's wrong. I think that private persons shouldn't be able to privatize social capital that they gained while performing a government job. For that matter, the same applies whether they were in a corporate or nonprofit job. In fact, that's a good reason for institutions to stop letting these big stars who drag all the attention to themselves make and maintain these private reputation-builders that they can't then control.
Sure, those same followers can dump him and then go follow the new guy. But he's got them now to blast out huge messages of lobbying industrial strength to enhance his new position -- at Google, or a Mitch Kapor nonprofit, or some other third-world-go-gooding collectivist operation like the NGO that languished after he went to take up his government job.
The State Department should make an account called @StateInnovator or whatever (@innovator is taken by some goof who wants Ross' job) and then have the picture of the person in that office for now on it, but not enable that person to make an entire fiefdom with his followers that he can then take away.
I first noticed this phenomenon of tribal leaders attracting all the attention to themselves with one-way broadcast accounts and numerous followers when I first came on Twitter five years ago (I joined in 2007 on my account Prokofy and 2008 on my accout catfitz). Some people would gain enormous amounts of followers -- the early adapters like Scoble did it with automatic scripts, in part scripts that automatically followed back other people or automatically said thank you or started conversations.
Twitter banned some of these resource-eating automatic scripts later, but the advantage was clear -- as it still is. When you join Twitter today, just as in the past, it forces on you a list of recommended people that you must chose among to make your "friends" before you can move on to using Twitter -- it's quite coercive and you can't seem to escape out of it. In fact, it forces on you the number of five friends before it lets you out of its clutches. The friends to pick from include Lady Gaga but also a lot of those tech friends of the Twitter devs -- Alec Ross is on there if I'm not mistaken and so is Human Rights Watch and Anne Marie Slaughter and other "progressives" who get a significant boost by having every new member of Twitter (I don't know if it is localized) have to pick from these enforced "friends". The only Republican leader on there is Mario Rubio although there is the now out-of-date Mitt Romney account.
A position at the State Department is not a place for you merely to build your personal resume and gain connections to use in corporate lobbying jobs later. You're supposed to build the institution while serving the public, you know. Serve the public?
Another thing that the rules should stipulate is that people making or operating social media accounts on behalf of the US government should not block critical members of the public on those services. If the services themselves have not found reason to block them for spam, incitement of hatred, or harassment with excessive @ posting etc. then those government officials should not block them merely because they are egomaniacs with thin skins.
Alec Ross muted and blocked me -- meaning he entirely disappeared from the view! -- on Facebook, where he maintains not a personal account to share pictures of his kids and cats, but continues his public, government influence-making.
That is too much power for government officials to have.
He had no business doing that. Any judge in the land would throw it out as a violation of the First Amendment by the state, not only censoring speech but blocking even the view of government speech from the public that is otherwise open to all.
It's no good hiding behind the fact that Facebook is a private company and it can do what it wants -- public officials can't do what they want and have to uphold the Constitution. It's not upholding the Constitution to hold town halls and block people who merely ask questions -- and it's not about swearing, or heckling or disrupting, that in a real-life town hall might bring the security guards or cops. It's about pasting a one-line disagreement on to the high-view page of an ego-infused influencer and arrogant "thought-leader" who is entirely full of himself and unable to take even the slightest mar of his propaganda campaign.
If officials went around behaving like this with the real press in real life, or went around behaving like this in town halls in real life, they'd be criticized severely. Oh, they've started doing that. Look at the ruckus over Woodward and pressure from the White House.
Officials gone wild on social media -- our Russian ambassador Michael McFaul comes to mind -- should be tethered more to their public service functions. And they are getting tethered, as Alec Ross found himself reined in, when State finally decided to do Twitter clearance and make people submit tweets before they blasted them to their huge audiences of 300,000 plus their massive network effect of re-tweeting.
When you see this, you can't help wondering if these accounts will finally be removed all together:
Michael McFaul @McFaul
23:35 in Moscow RT @robbirgfeld Ambassador @McFaul spends a couple of hours a night responding and reading social media. #smwdiplomacy
Ross' feed has always tended toward the anodyne, to the point that you wondered if it was some kind of Aesopian message:
@AlecJRoss
1,476 years ago today, the Ostrogoths began the first siege of Rome. It lasted for a little over a year.
@AlecJRoss
This has long been a key to America's success. We must attract brilliant innovators like Tesla & allow them to make America their home (2/2)
@AlecJRoss
212 year ago today, America's 1st Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, was inaugurated as President of the United States.
Er, what made him think of barbarians at the gates?
And...sucking up to his new boss, implying that he, too, could become president?
Funny that Kerry comes in, and this guy goes out. Why? Just a new broom sweeps clean?
Alec follows slavishly the "progressive" line and the Google line for all the issues. And I suspect Kerry will be no different, but I just don't know yet.
Ross has always dutifully retweeted the line du jour, which is exemplified by a recent one about how "we must all oppose cell phone jailbreaking" and retweet of this link -- and yes, retweets ALWAYS mean endorsement with this gang. The president answered this tekkie flashmob and Ross revelled in it.
Google pushes this line effectively through all its networks and lobbying active measures and agents of influence. Why? Because it wants to erode the power of telecoms, and have people be able to directly use Google and the Internet in general more for communicating.
Hackers and copyleftists who make up the some 7 million people who jailbreak their phones are lobbying to have this wrongful act legalized.
Why is it a wrongful act? Well, because it is a violation of the user's agreement. Why do these mean telecoms want to "lock you in" to their services? Well, because they gave you a ridiculously low-priced loss-leader -- your smart phone itself. Those things are expensive to make. They should cost more than they do. But no one would buy them if they did. So they drop the price of the phone, then tuck that cost into a binding two-year agreement to use a phone service like Verizon or AT&T. You pay ahead something on this contract, then have to keep paying, and if you default, you are billed with a heavy fine that the companies zealously collect.
Well, aren't these telecoms just being greedy? Well, no, they have real costs -- the kind of costs Susan Crawford never calculates in her jihad against them applauded by Google -- capital costs.
When you jailbreak the phone and start using Internet VOIP or various other things like Skype only for calls or free wifi, then you defeat the plan that subsidizes your phone.
This criminality doesn't trouble Alec Ross, Mashable, or the White House, as it responded to a massive engineered outpouring with smug approval. I can only hope the courts will push back. Because it isn't fair or just to the telecoms. How will they get the cost of the phone and its use covered in a world where hackers rampantly engage in theft of services and "liberate" the device?
When I get a cable TV box, I don't "jailbreak" it to get more channels I don't pay for; I don't "liberate" my Verizon modem box to get more broadband or even some other service. Why should I get to do this to my phone?
Apple wants to go on disguising the cost of these phones -- they can be $400 and that doesn't reflect either its real cost or the cost it should be if it had better labour conditions -- to sell more of them and get people hooked then on the apps and other products. They don't like jailbreaking, but I don't know that they are going to lobby that hard against it.
It's wrong of the president to take a position on what amounts to a *business dispute about costs and how to cover them* and weigh in on the side of some businesses and not others. Doing that is not proper to free enterprise and a liberal and democratic state. It's the sort of thing that begins to happen in socialist states with cronyism and state capitalism or oligarchy.
Alec Ross is delighted to be part of that. His entire career as "innovator" exemplifies my constant refrain about the Wired State, that a group of radicals and corporate copyleftists have harnessed their social media inventions to take power and ram through their agenda.
While Ross ignored my question on Twitter, where he doesn't block me for some reason, he confirmed in answer to another person's question on Facebook (which I got a friend to check as he has me blocked) that the position at State is going to remain open.
Who will take over this position?
Probably someone who will travel less -- after all, if the Sequester has to stop Co-dels (Congressional delegations) from going to some of their favourite haunts like Vienna or Paris, then it makes sense that the Innovator guy should stop going to Australia and places like that to boost the copyleftist cause.
While I've been a big critic, especially meeting him in person and confronting him with his bad ideas -- like the "post-Westphalian" borderless woo-woo, and the "engineering against copyright infringement" shill -- Diplopundit is more skilled and more connected than me and is scathing.
"State Department Bundle of Joy" indeed! But it's all part of an overall social media schizophrenia that Diplo covers further.
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