Do you find it hard to understand what left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and libertarian mean any more?
Is Glenn Greenwald on the left or right? Libertarian (he used to consult for Cato) or communist (he has spoken before the Socialist Workers' Party annual meeting)?
How can it be that if Greenwald debates Ruth Marcus, a liberal Democrat and columnist in the liberal Washington Post, denounced by conservatives, he and his Twitter sock-puppets/cronies can accuse her of supporting the Bush Administration's torture? But wait, she agrees that James Clapper "lied" and "he should be ashamed of it" and "it's totally intolerable" -- so what's the difference between her anti-NSA statement and Greenwald's?! (well, he will settle for nothing less than a trial and punishment of this "lying" official, and Marcus points out to this lawfaring lawyer that perjury law is complicated and getting a judge to actually do this against an official merely doing his job as he saw fit would be quite hard to do).
Do you wonder how it is that Paul Carr, Mark Ames formerly of the Exile and Yasha Levine, all funded by Silicon Valley (they were bought out by Pando Daily) and technolibertarians of sorts (or are they?) can print trash about Snowden, and suddenly decide to bash Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen, the NYU professor, for joining on to the new media enterprise First Look -- funded by the ebay millionaire Pierre Omidyar, who himself loves Greenwald...who speaks to the socialists? They're all about Big IT and Silicon Valley and technocommunism in the end -- why don't they get along?
How is it that Jacob Appelbaum, who still apparently gets Department of Defense funding and never really seems to scream about Obama the way Glenn Greenwald does, can be doing even more radical work revealing documents that aren't even from Snowden, but could even be -- who knows! -- from some GRU mole in the NSA merely using the Snowden flurries as a cover?
Well, if you look at this handy-dandy infographic chart I've made (sorry, I suck at Photoshopping), you will start to see how it all comes together -- or falls apart (and this chart helps explain why Omidyar and Greenwald will not last.)
Think of the four corners of our Metaverse as the extremes of thinking 1) Obama is a devil; 2) Obama is an angel; 3) Snowden is a traitor, or 4) Snowden is a hero. That's one level (think of the first horizontal X-axis in Second Life).
Then, think of people's attitudes towards capitalism and communism which really infuse everything (that's the Y-axis then, or a second horizontal layer). Everyone likes to pretend these categories and these ideologies don't exist anymore, but of course they do. Look, do you like Occupy Wall Street and want to shut down the stock market and jail the banksters? Then you're a communist. Do you think it's okay for Goldman Sachs and wealthy law firms to fund Obama's campaign along with Google, even though you're for that crazy unworkable socialist ObamaCare of his? Then you're a capitalist. Understood. Don't pretend these categories don't exist.
But there's more -- there's your attitude toward government -- think of this as yet another axis (like the vertical Z in Second Life if this were a 3D object which of course we could make in Second Life but I can't draw here).
There you might be an anarchist (no government), or a minarchist (for minimal government, but at least some); you might be for democracy, which means elected officials and separation of powers and the rule of law, or corporatocracy, which might be rule-by-law and emphasis on both private corporations and governments agencies.
Above the "democracy" line you will find those who like Obama -- he's president, after all -- and tend to think Snowden has done something wrong -- he's broken the law and gone against the democratc consensus that yes, we do need state secrets and agencies to keep them -- and find intelligence to keep us safe.
Or below the "democracy" line, you still might be in the Obama tank and loving Snowden, but you might be for oligarchy, which is where there is a state nominally affirming capitalism, or engaging in "state capitalism" as the Trotskyists called it -- but just as likely embracing many aspects of communism. This state still accords power to certain wealthy boyars -- as long as they support the state. You may even want to transform this state so that it is better for your business.
If you're under the anarchy line, you're for destroying government and running everything from the Internet and the IRC channel with your friends, maybe with a Drupal site and some Liquid Democracy Pirate Party "voting" scheme -- but fuck America, militaries, even roads.
Well, you get the idea. It's a grid -- and you can slide in any direction up or down or across or diagonally.
Naturally, I've put myself in the most perfect, centrist, democratic and good position, as any author would : )
But note what else is going on -- the attitiudes towards technology and how it will be used to pursue one's other values of anarchy or statism, communism or corporativism or statism.
Technocommunist as readers of this blog know is a belief that you can collectivize people online and use technology to redistribute wealth; the state withers away, as it is supposed to under communism and "every cook can rule the state". Of course, there's an avant-garde of the workers who know best (coders).
Technolibertarian can amount to "communism for thee but not for me" or a belief in social Darwinism, Randianism, meritocracy on steroids -- and no illusions that you will teach the homeless to code or even most kids in high school to do anything. Fuck 'em, you are going to have California secede from the United States.
Technoliberal means that you embrace technological innovation but you expect democratic government to maintain oversight over technology so that it does not harm liberal democracy itself.
Technoprogressive means that you believe in the transformative power of technology to change human nature and "make a better world" and you will make money in order to spend it on establishing socialism -- which will work better because of technology and distributive...stuff.
Technosocialist means that you would establish more limits on corporations in establishing your equitable society, except for the Big IT ones and those that provide you a paycheck. Distribution will be coerced. You're welcome.
Technostalinist means that you are for using technology to settle scores with your political enemies, and establishing some kind of state that can crush evil greedy oligarchs and capitalists.
And that's how we get the different boxes in this grid.
You could find Snowden a hero and think Obama is a devil -- and be a technolibertarian like Rand Paul for minimal government.
Or you could find Snowden a hero and not think much of Obama but not really pay attention to him, and be for anarchism and communism -- which you think you and your friends will implement just fine.
OR you could find Obama an angel and Snowden a traitor -- that would put you on the top of the box, with the majority of Americans, quite frankly.
Somebody like me who did not vote for Obama a second time is still in that box because Obama is,after all, the president, the result of a democratic election and therefore a figure of legitimate authority. Looking at this box, you could additionally pin little pictures of Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan or Ted Cruz into the boxes fairly easily -- I'd be on the Hillary side of the line.
Supportive readers of this blog will likely have no trouble finding MarkAmesExiled in the Technostalinist box. That's because he hates capitalism -- he loathes Obama as a sell-out to Wall Street -- and he is for hanging capitalists he hates from the lamp posts. He admires Eduard Limonov, the National Bolshevik, and he finds Snowden a traitor - but a traitor to...what, exactly? A powerful state that he imagines can be made a utopian state by ridding it of evil, corrupt capitalists? He's no anarchist, in fact, and he's no libertarian, because he imagines some mighty force that will be capable of punishing these big, evil oligarchs. There isn't any such force except Stalin.
Paul Carr, on the other hand, might slide more toward the technolibertarian box because he's more of a softy, but at the end of the day, his paycheck is still signed by the titans of Silicon Valley and he appreciates that.
Up in the love-Obama box is of course Jeff Gauvin, 18,000 followers, unfollower of me because I said something he didn't like once, hater of Greenwald, lover of Obama (his Twitter name is Jefferson Obama). Jeff is actually Canadian, for all his American hero handles, and therefore tends toward the socialist as a national trait -- Canada is a country where a large percentage of the working population has jobs with the government or funded by the government.
Jeff is typical of a lot of tweeters who loathe Greenwald because he threatens their Obama and their progressivism with his...libertarian/communism or whatever it is. Note that I have Greenwald straddle the two categories because I think Greenwald just does what's best for Greenwald in the end, a powerful force that perhaps someday, may lead to contrition or at least turncoating.
John Schindler is more liberal than I am -- he's for reforming the NSA and I'm for leaving it absolutely untouched until other more profound issues are solved (more on that later) and until Obama is out of office, since I believe as a stealth-socialist, Obama is merely trying to destroy the capitalist state.
We may or may not get lucky and get Hillary back, in which case I will vote for her and so will John Schindler. If we get only Elizabeth Warren as a candidate because of powerful hate-Hillary forces gathering in quite a few of those boxes, I will definitely NOT vote for her; Schindler, I don't know.
Poor General Alexander I've put in the corporatocracy box merely as a kind of symbol. I have no idea what his personal views are. He may be a closet libertarian, for all I know. He may be a liberal Democrat struggling to reform this monster -- who knows. I'm assuming that he's mad as hell at Snowden and I'm putting him very close to the "Snowden=traitor" box. I'm putting him in the same column with the "Obama as devil" because I have to figure Gen. Alexander feels like Obama threw him under the bus. I put him in the corporate box merely because the symbiosis between the military and the private corporate contractors makes up a state-within-a-state in some ways, although I am not a conspiracy monger and actually don't think there is something inherently wrong with military contracting in a free and capitalist society. It's just a tendency you want to watch and regulate and I'm for doing less contracting and having more paid, benefitted staff -- Manning and Snowden were contractors.
I actually think the most important thing Gen. Alexander could do is to form a think tank to fight for national security after he retires, responding to all the outrageous things that people are likely to do to the NSA.
Why don't I put myself up smack against the traitor box?
Well, I don't think that's a useful category to discuss Snowden, really; usually I'll call him "that little felon." To be a traitor, you would have had to show loyalty to you country first, and then betray it; I think for Snowden, the Internet is his country, he has absolutely no loyalty to anything like "homeland" or "government" and leans toward technocommunism or technolibertarianism if not technostalinism -- after all, he ran to first China, then Russia to help him in his struggle to smash the American state.
I think the issue is this: there are warring factions in government, and Snowden represents in fact a faction within the state -- the Wired State in the making, if you will, which is part old state, part oligarchs, part anarchists or Stalinists.
That's why I worry. Cory Ondreijka, formerly of the Navy and the NSA, represents just such a faction, too (more on him soon). While I'm generally supportive of the NSA as an institution, and I find it legitimate and necessary; I'm not supportive of some of the geek factions in government, including in the NSA, which I view as the enemy of liberal democracy (and they exist out of government, too, and are in a revolving door between government and Silicon Valley).
It used to be that people in government in the civil service and foreign service had their little factions, but they kept them to themselves, engaging only in minor skirmishes and minor sabotage; they more or less served the elected president.
They don't do that any more, since the wikification of government and social media gave them a lever and a voice to destroy government leadership they don't like.
So now people who are for friending Iran, despite the will of the Congress or the pragmatism of a compromising president, will deliberately leak, sabotage, undermine and present people with fait accomplis.
They'll make anonymous Twitter accounts and so damage there.
People who think the smart, hip thing to do is to dump on Israel as the problem for why America doesn't have good street cred in the world also leak, sabotage, undermine and create facts on the ground (like the botching of Syria and capitulation in Iran negotiations).
Well, you get the idea! See what you think and suggest ideas and changes. If anybody is better at Photoshop than I am, you're welcome to make this look better, just credit me for the idea!
I've said repeatedly that the tech press is just a wrapper for the gadgets, to sell them better. And doesn't that sound like something a technocommunist might say, somebody who is just about to use the phrase "neoliberal" and "rent-seeking" in the next sentence?
But no, it's just a statement of what is the case. And I don't mind if the tech press exists merely to sell gadgets. The tech web sites are businesses. Businesses can do what they want and seek value and sell things as they wish. It's still a free country with a free market. If they seem craven then journalistically and don't tell the truth about the gadgets, okay, but then that's what a few critical blogs and maverick sites are for...if they exist...and I don't know if they exist any more. Some of the writers at TechCrunch like Alexia Tsotsis will strike a pose and get all critical of their industry now and then and worry about poor people -- but it probably just helps sell the comfort-inducing gadgets better...
I think Loren Feldman got it right when he said that when AOL bought TechCrunch, it began to be impossible to do independent blogging on tech anymore, i.e. it was a debilitating example. Of course he disproves this himself with his blog, but I take the point. TC was more independent in its reporting when it was just Arrington running it.
And I don't have to try hard to prove this when you get something like "Googlicious" (couldn't you just barf at the name!) coming to CNET to be about "all things Google" run by a guy who seems like a relative of Torley in Second Life -- the same kind of artificial pumped up enthusiasm about tech.
To be sure, "Apple Byte," the show that existed before "Googlicious" (barf) is going to remain in place. Yuck! Of course, it probably will get views because people want to read about new gadgets and they don't care if it is fluff.
So then I got to thinking. How is Chris going to keep The New Republic alive? What ads can he wrap around THAT stuff -- the progressive, pro-Obama stuff that comes out of TNR?
And the answer is -- and this is funny -- old companies like Northrop Grumman which are stalwarts of the military industrial complex (they are a leading manufacturer of drones) and of course even involved in cybersecurity these days. So it's kinda funny to see their add opposite some article loving up Obama or praising Snowden. I don't recall Grumman being there before, maybe it was, or maybe the new management landed it. It's funny.
Advertisers don’t want to put their ads next to the investigative story; it’s extremely difficult to do that
Hmm. Well, except you could argue Grumman has done that, in a way Although frankly, I don't recall an investigative story in TNR lately, of the kind they did on Gov. Perry or Mitt Romney, which were so very thorough -- oh, and at the end of the day, weren't so much investigative as they were about oppo research to help Obama.
I couldn't help thinking of what Marshall McLuhan taught: "The bad news of the news helps sell the good news of the ads."
So the Vietnam War's bad news helps sell cigarettes or perfume or whiskey, which were the things that tended to be more advertised in magazines and newspapers in those days.
It's funny, TNR hasn't done a lot on Snowden. Certainly nothing first hand. I think because on the whole, Silicon Valley as an institution didn't really care for Snowden hugely, as it hurt their social media platforms' reputation and the their cloud business overseas (supposedly, although this is so far all speculation and not data) -- as foreigners were supposedly concerned about US-based services on servers the NSA could get at.
I'm sure McLuhan meant to say something very penetrating and anti-establishment with his witty saying, which I remember hearing him say in person (because I went to his classes at St. Michael's in the 1970s). But I have to say, I don't find it some earth-shattering horrible neo-liberal bad thing. People like contrasts, and a little vinegar to go with their chips, or something.... Doesn't the product seem sweeter if it is next to bad news?
Except, food and beverage products aren't the things you see on those pages anymore. You see Northrop Grumman. Or you see car insurance .
You know, I clicked all the way through on that Northrop Grumman ad on TNR which was pretty snazzy and had one of those flashy films with smart talking heads. Except...they mouthed inanities as they always do on these ads. You see the same kind of ads for companies like this on CNET or TechCrunch.
I'm trying to think what the purpose of an ad like that is. Most of the intellectual readers of TNR are not in purchasing departments or in a position to requisition cybersecurity services. Well, maybe some in the government are, and maybe they hope to reach those people. Or maybe they just do it as a public image thing. Before, if someone said, "What do you know about Northrop Grumman?" I would have said, "Um, do they make airplanes or something?" Now I know they do cybersecurity -- and I hope, in such a way to keep out the next Edward Snowden.
It seems that time again when there's a willingness to look at the horrid elitism of Silicon Valley.
Usually Silicon Valley's rich and famous are never targeted by mass culture because they are too hipster and too secretive and too interwoven with the social media platforms. Even to make a collage with Sergei Brin's face inside Mr. Moneybags from the Monopoly Game is to commit a blasphemy (maybe I can't find the old one I made of Larry Page on a blog because it has been Google-bombed to get rid of any footprint...)
So now there's this -- Silicon Valley's Dysfunctional Fetish -- but that's a really misleading headline because it's not just that SV likes to laugh at other's misfortune, they really do think they are a superior breed.
And surprise, surprise, there's Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook biggie who now invests in every single thing you use on the Internet, who I remember tweeting about from TechCrunch last spring when he gave an interview on the stage, and talked about how everyone should learn to code and if they didn't, they were chumps. No way! (I tweeted with the hashtag and Arrington instantly started following me, and I figured I might be blocked or something. Evidently not.)
Palihapitiya: We're in this really interesting shift.
The center of power is here, make no mistake. I think we've known it now
for probably four or five years. But it's becoming
excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is
created is no longer in New York, it's no longer in Washington, it's no
longer in LA. It's in San Francisco and the Bay Area. And when
you look at sort of, like, how markets react to things like that, and
when there's no reaction, it should be taken as a very subtle signal
that the power dynamics have changed. Because markets value meaningful
events, markets discount meaningless events. And so the functional value
of the government is effectively discounted to zero
Of course, this speaks not only to the idea, long held by the geek overlords that the finance industry and the old dying manufacturing industries of the East Coast "don't add value" -- and their apps to send pictures of your cat do - but it's more about the Shutdown, which fulfilled their notions of the "broken Congress" that has to be "circumvented" -- as they said during the anti-SOPA crusade.
As we know, technocollectivist Beth Noveck, who for a time served as a deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology (!) openly said she wanted to "blow up Congress".
Geeks always go around saying Congress people are stupid, they don't get tech, blah blah. Long ago when Scoble went to visit Congress and get them all using Twitter, the invasion started. Not a theory I buy.
In part, the elitists can think as they do because they've hidden all their manufacturing and back end overseas, in China, India, Russia so they don't have to think about their working conditions and standards of living. Occasionally, someone will be seized with guilt over suicides at an Apple factory, but not really. The really don't have to think about "how the other half lives" in their industry because it's all invisible. They seldom have to think about the working stiffs in their own country because they take company buses to work, they have company masseurs and company chefs and never have to come out of the bubble.
Some might call this technolibertarianism, and even Randianism, but I think it's more complex -- it's "communism for thee, capitalism for thee". (Note Stowe Boyd below whining about "neo-liberalism" in Silicon Valley. For every technolibertarian, there is indeed a technocommunist to bait him.)
I'm not surprised that this story involved Jason Calicanis. I remember when Jason blamed people whose houses were foreclosed on as being in over their heads -- it was all their fault. I distinctly remember when he said that; I distinctly remember when we all argued about this on 2008 in Twitter.
At the time, my brother and I were dealing with my mother's foreclosed home -- and the case didn't fit his prejudice. All that happened to her was that she died before being able to make her latest mortgage payment. Before that, she had paid for the payments out of a teacher's pension and my father's insurance money after he died. The condo she lived in was one that my parents had saved up for their entire life for their retirement. But Wells Fargo seized it rapidly after her death for some reason, not being willing to accept my brother's check for the mortgage. There was a long drawn out case with lawyers and fees and finally a re-mortgaging -- but then oops, it couldn't be rented out, even at half the price of the mortgage, because in the recession housing collapse, there were still developers building new condos and letting them go for less. It was impossible to sell this white elephant for any amount. My brother lived in it and commuted 90 miles every day and then finally gave up. In the end, the bank took it again. Sad. But not anyone's fault for "living beyond their means". Oh, yeah, none of us had an extra $2000 a month to spend on a house we hadn't planned on paying for, that's all.
Sure, there were people who lived beyond their means. But that took bankers giving them the NINJA loans (no income, no job applicants) -- and part of this was a desire to lift the poor and particularly minorities to a better place, which was encouraged by programs under Clinton and encouraged by Fanny Mae and other lenders. It was supposed to be a good idea.
When I re-argued all this with Calacanis again the other day, he insisted that he said both at the time -- yes, people lived beyond their means and yes, there were greedy and predatory lenders. Except I don' recall him saying the second things at the time and the fact that he still blames the victims lets us know that is his mindset.
Today there's yet another story like this, some good reporting by Alexia Tsotsis, who lives the life of the rich and famous herself (her boyfriend is the Instagram billionaire) but who is always stumping for the little guy (because they all, even when they do it well, want socialism for the masses and capitalism/riches for themselves.) A Better World!
A Twitter exec is shown banging on BART workers on strike.
See, this is also about hate-on-Twitter month because instead of staying with the socialist collectivist plan of always just making everything for free and having coders live on Ramen and entrepreneurs renew VC cash or be passed around to Big IT buyers, they decided to go IPO. That took them out of the technocommunist realm into the technolibertarian round.
So this suit is complaining about strikers and wishing a Doberman to attack them....er no, not them, whoever is "causing" the strike. Hmm, that was some fancy footwork...
So do the Silicon Valley overlords rule our world? In some ways they rule the mindshare with things like Twitter or Facebook. But their lobbying so far has only been about things directly related to their California Business Model (anti-SOPA) and then only about immigration, since they want more Indian and other programmers to be able to come to the US and be paid less than Americans already here...or something. They don't seem to have a grander vision than that.
There's also this -- remember when we were counting how many jobs all these new Big IT things make up -- Google, Facebook etc? It was like half a million. A ridiculously small amount. SV is not a job generator; only very highly skilled people for the most part get jobs there and there aren't that many anyway. I bet fracking in North Dakota or health car ein New York have higher rate of job generation now than the app factories. Most people employed in the USA have jobs outside this sector, not in it, even if they rely on it or are tangentially involved. Yes, everything is coded. But not everybody codes.
I hate my banks. I've never found a good one, and I've tried multiple ones. They have those horrid $35 overdraft fees that you get whacked with no matter how hard you try because they cunningly change the dates that certain debits hit automatically -- like some $3.00 charge suddenly hits out of nowhere that you had thought debited long ago when calculating your accounts -- and whoops, 6 other checks mess up and you get whacked. Really nasty.
Or take this -- I deposit a check, some of it clears as it always does, I happily go away on vacation, and then suddenly discover that a hold has been put on my check and the amount that wsa initially made available is now locked. The hold is put on for *11 business days*. Huh? I call and call and discover that it's because the issuer of the check has forgotten to put the date on the check. The person calls their bank, straightens it out, and I call back my bank to tell them.
But then...They buck me again and I go in circles. Ultimately, I come back from vacation and go in to the branch in person -- but going in person to a bank does no good nowadays, they merely call their 1-800 number for you -- it's eerie. They have no power to do anything in that branch about that check physically deposited in their ATM. I go back to the issuer -- and they confirm that their bank has already debited the amount *on the first day*. Naturally, after doing that, the issuer's bank felt their job was and wasn't interested in pursuing it.
But meanwhile, my bank held that check for *10 days needlessly* just on that excuse of the lack of a date -- which the bank of the issuer didn't care about and let go through. It did that because it was a convenient excuse to make interest off the float -- that's the principle of banks and I get it. No amount of effort to try to get these two banks to talk to each other and release my funds would work.
I had the same sort of endless loop and paralysis from the branch when I put cash in the machine -- and it didn't record and show on my balance. I was really hopping mad on that one and asked them to get back to me when they counted the drawer that day. They said that some other unrelated service did that and they couldn't do anything. Again, for 14 business days, I struggled to have them reflect that actual cash that had actually gone into their ATM reflect on the balance -- finally it did.
Or take the time that one of those evil debt collectors with sewer-service (i.e. no proper service at all), who I'd actually been sending regular payments to, suddenly slaps a lien on my account, but I don't know that because no notification is given by that sewer-server or by the bank. I go in and deposit a large check. Although the lien amount is small, and easily covered by the large check, the *entire amount* is held *for 30 days* causing major life havoc. Can you imagine such idiocy? Why? Because the lien technically put the account into negative, before the large check cleared -- which normally it would do in 2-3 days. So that became an excuse to freeze the entire thing. The bank demanded that I get a statement from the debt collector that they were satisfied now and had been paid. They refused until I got a notarized statement from the bank -- which I immediately did -- that there were plenty of funds available to cover their lien the following day.
Despite the eventual clearance of the check and plenty of funds available to clear the lien, both sides kept circling endlessly each requiring the other to produce proof of this already-happened event in order to unfreeze the account, pay the lien, and give me access to the rest of my money. It was insanity, and I kept calling all kinds of offices; my favourite was when I called some department or something or another that happened to be in Louisiana, and I heard the people just laughing out loud with each other when I called them. I finally just closed the account to try to force the issue. Whereupon I was billed for all the $35 charges for various automatic payments that hit the bank account *with a perfectly cleared check with its funds availbale on it* but then got rejected. It was Kafka. No, it was a bank.
So yeah, I get it about banks -- insanity. I always marvelled that those Occupy Wall Street freaks never took up the *consumer* issues of banking that are like this -- the $35 charges, the wild occurrences with holding of funds that are really available, etc. We all have these stories. Why didn't they picket banks over the $35 charge? Had they done that, I *might* have come to a demonstration, although likely not, as I don't share their radical solutions of overthrowing capitalism to solve these things. I'm for reform, not revolution.
In fact, litigation has helped to mitigate the $35 issues. There are several successful class-action suits that have forced some of these banks to reform their evil practices -- like those ones where they suddenly rearrange all the dates of when charges hit to make more checks bounce to their advantage. And nowadays, banks don't have those charges if you specify that you opt out of them when they involve certain kinds of transactions -- although it doesn't free you from the scourge forever.
Of course, I remember when the "funds not arranged" fee was $5 or $10, not $35, and when checks didn't take so long to clear or didn't get held. Oh, and I remember when we had 10% interest on our savings accounts, too. Oh, well.
But despite all these negative experiences with banks, which have actually driven me to use check-cashing agencies and post office money orders instead -- despite their fees -- simply because they are more fast and reliable and ultimately cheaper in the end -- I don't have any hatred for "banksters".
First of all, it would be awfully hard to hate the poor tellers and managers in the branches, many of them minorities in entry-level positions with low-paid jobs because it's not their fault at all.
Yeah, I get it that the real people with the money are way above them and live in palaces and all the rest, empires made out of our $35 charges. But you know, we could also just manage our accounts better -- and one way to do that is to buy a money order, because when it's debited, it's really debited as cash, and you have a way to trace it, and it doesn't come back and "hit" much later to surprise you. Yes, it costs a $1, but why not keep the post office going? I'm happy to do this. It works for me.
I'm sorry, but every time one of these Occupiers rants on about how the banksters haven't gone to jail even as the hackers have, I shrug and say, "Good!". The hackers have been guilty and belong in jail. I'm not seeing what the evidence is for cases to be tried as *criminal offenses* rather than civil.
For one, this article, while it admits some have gone to jail, doesn't really give us the full monte: lots of bankers have gone to jail in fact. Here's ten right here.
They're just not happy that the CEO of companies haven't gone to jail. Well, I'd like them to report out evidence that isn't ideological, that isn't hatred of capitalism, that isn't just venom and spite, but is an actual list for a real indictment. I'm not seeing it. And so they are just posturing and propagandizing.
My answer:
What separates us from Russia or China is
that we don't jail people for practicing capitalism because we have a
free society with a free market. In Russia, there isn't due process or
justice for people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky who would never be in jail
in America.
And that's just it. You sound like the wildest
Occupy Wall Street nutter wanting people to go to jail to satisfy some
sense of "justice" you have. But you and others making this demand
never, ever explain what the actual criminal charges, and criminal
EVIDENCE would be to charge these people with *crimes*. It's especially
puzzling when they've had civil charges and faced stiff penalties, yet
it's never enough for you, you won't be happy until they are behind
bars.
Yet you don't report any evidence that would justify
turning these cases into *criminal* cases, and you just wave your jazz
hands and say oh, they must be too big to try.
Oh, and you're too big to come up with actual reported evidence?
Andy Greenberg always exasperates me. He's supposed to be reporting from "the Capitalist Tool," as Forbes used to call itself before it became pro-Putin (Mark Adomanis) and pro-technocommunist (see all the Internet, hacking, WikiLeaks, etc stories). But he's always on the side of the hackers sort of surreptiously, golf-clapping, secret-sharing to get the story. He always acts so dewy-eyed and enthusiastic about these hacker heroes he's ostensibly covering critically (I'm reading his book now This Machine Kills Secrets and the passages on Assange are so thrilling and dramatic -- for him. (Secretly he imagines WikiLeaks is like Woody Guthrie's guitar with the slogan "This Machine Kills Fascists" -- maybe it just isn't in the hands of the right player yet!)
Palantir's CEO is called "deviant" because...his hair stands on end and...he's like any geek in his views and tastes and probably no different than Andy Greenberg himself.
It's called "CIA-Funded" because....it has an investment from the start-up investment arm of the CIA and because it has CIA contracts.
If every Silicon Valley that has government contracts were called "funded by" the government, that would be ridiculous, of course. Greenberg can invoke this "funded by" -- as if Palantir lived on public assistance like a welfare queen -- because of this start-up funding and its contracts with the NSA to do scanning of Big Data.
But if one of those "Start-Up America" type of things comingling government and AOL funds and involving Tim O'Reilly were to "fund" something, why, that would be cool and not exposed as "government funding". Some other friend of Obama getting masses of green stimulus cash wouldn't be exposed as "government-funded" by Forbes but would be a cool start-up. Oh, you know, like Tesla, Musk's electric car company, gets government subsidies (isn't it 30%), but Andy isn't writing an expose about how this form of technocommunism is functioning in our society.
Instead, it's only evil Palantir and evil CIA that gets the scrutiny because everything is tied to the NSA scandal now.
My comment buried in the collapsed comments at Forbes:
Nothing you’ve reported here indicates that Palantir is committing any crime or suspected of any crime.
Katz-Lacabe never complained about Google driving around and
vacuuming up his wireless connection data because Google is “cool” for
geeks and Palantir is “evil” — maybe because it doesn’t have the usual
“better world” technocommunist mantra, but is made up of
technolibertarians (they are fiercely at odds).
You reference the HBGary scandal that indirectly involved Palantir.
But HBGary created a proposal to do things like create fake Internet
personas or try to discredit Glenn Greenwald. This was a pitch to
potential customers in the government, not actualities. You neglect to
mention that we know these private *thoughts* and *intentions* of this
private company because they were hacked by Anonymous as you well know,
using coercive, fraudulent and illegal methods *for which some of them
were arrested and are now in jail*. HBGary was also not found to have
committed a crime; it’s not a crime, thank God, to want to “get” Glenn
Greenwald, or tens of thousands of people would be in jail over nothing.
As for this, the self-referential ethics created on the fly, the Bat
phone and all the rest — this is no different than any geek anywhere in
power. John Perry Barlow told me the source of his ethics was himself
and his friends when I challenged him directly on this, given all his
loopy ideas. Any geek running any code anywhere thinks they are smarter
than others, above the law, and don’t need to answer to “corrupt”
politicians or “outdated” law that “stifles innovation”. This is a
problem throughout the entire industry that doesn’t self-regulate and
never met a piece of legislation from Washington trying to curb its
anarchy that it didn’t hate and didn’t unleash its techno firepower and
agitation of the geek masses on Youtube to stop.
One thing that represents a glimmer of hope in terms of ethics here
is that the paranoid leadership at Palantir at least creates firm data
trails for every engineer accessing every thing so they have records.
Maybe they should do more of that at Booz, Hamilton Allen.
* * *
As for Katz-Lacabe whining about his license plate -- along with his kids -- getting snapped, I'm finding it hard to care about this in some deep way and it reminds me of the TSA whiners.
First, when information like this is scanned and put in a data base, it isn't read by humans -- it's not humans gawking at his kids. It isn't combed by humans -- it's a machine, filtering for matches. Obviously, the ability to make a data set like this saves the lives of children abducted, as Palantir notes citing real cases. And no one, least of Katz-Lacabe, can show how he has actually suffered some loss of rights or false arrest or false anything due to this record. It's a hysterical hypothetical. It might be used wrongly. It might compromise him in some way -- but it hasn't nor can he demonstrate that it will, really.
I view all of this activity on the Internet as merely the electronic version of a cop on the beat. If a human cop walked down your street or drove down your street, scanning with his human eyes your car, your children, your lawn, you wouldn't care. This is acceptable and even needed. If his human memory retained some of these images, such as to be able to ask questions when he spots your car in a ditch, or spots your child being tugged away by someone who isn't you, you'd only be too happy.
The difference between human agency and machine agency is seldom analyzed in these debates.
It's the typical geeky hysterical edge-casing trying to make a larger political point, but it's pretty suspect.
He's claiming that Apple "bans journalism" critical of religions:
“We have a lot of software that forbids journalism.” He refers to the
IoS [iphone operating system] Terms of Service for app developers that
includes text that says, literally: “If you want to criticize a
religion, write a book.” You can distribute that book through the Apple
bookstore, but Apple doesn’t want you writing apps that criticize
religion. Apple enforces an anti-journalism rule, banning an app that
shows where drone strikes have been.
Really, Anil? "A lot" of software? What on earth are you talking about?
Probably this, the intifada app. That's all. There likely isn't any other use case of Apple "forbidding journalism".
As for the drone strike app, they may have decided that if the US government declares them secret, there is no sense in facing a possible lawsuit over it, I don't know the specifics. Plenty of people report on drone strikes. Again, probably some of the news apps that *are* allowed on the phone contain this reporting.
My comment:
re really blocking “journalism”.
That sounds like an overheated exaggeration that is basically trying
to exonerate anti-Israel hate speech (or perhaps some other crude hate
war game against Muslims or something) that really wouldn’t qualify as
“journalism”.
They’re right that if you want to express your hatred for religion, a
book is a better format because you can capture more nuances and make
your arguments.
What is the “journalism” of any sort — about religions or any topic —
that would fit into an app? Obviously, they don’t mean news apps, as
there are articles in the New York Times or on the BBC which will
contain critical comments about Catholics, Muslims, and Jews, for
example. The apps carrying these op-ed pages or news articles are not
blocked for their content, obviously — which is journalism critical of
religion.
What Apple means specifically is the intifada app, that crudely
propagandized the violent Palestinian movement against Israel, and
denigrated Israel and Jews.
There may be others that involved such crude hate speech in the form
of the externals of the app itself, not the content it might bring.
Apple, as a private company, is going to create some standards of
taste and against hate speech that aren’t going to fit your own
extremist politics. Good! If you want a different mobile company, go to
CREDO. Maybe they have an independent app store where you can still get
the intifada app.
The key is having a market with pluralism, so that those who feel
they absolutely can’t live without hate apps can get them. The opposite —
where “progressives” could force private corporations to include
extreme political content they endorse — would not be freedom.
The train station in Soligorsk, Belarus, Morozov's home town. Photo by El Bingle.
I'm reading Evgeny Morozov's book To Save Everything, Click Here -- and it's both boring and fascinating because it's like deja-vu all over again -- I've written on exactly the same topics myself for nearly ten years, usually as a dissident surrounded by geeks who relentlessly hated and bullied me.
It's filled with the hypothetical hystericals that he castigates geeks for -- he's adopted this as a literary style worthy of Jeff Jarvis or Seth Godin. For example, he tells us the horror of something called BinCam that can document our garbage and put it up on social media so that -- in theory -- our neighbours or the vigilant state could examine our detritus and tell whether in fact we were recycling sufficiently or perhaps not even eating correctly.
The problem with these stories is that they are anecdotes. Nobody has BinCam. BinCam isn't anywhere installed in such sufficient quantities as to cause anything like the ruckus Morozov imagines. That's because nobody wanted it -- maybe a few "quantified life" geeks experimenting did. Or if it did get installed, it was not with the privacy-busting social-media-shaming factor, but with more of the mundane city planning capacity to tell where the garbage pick-ups could be deployed, to save energy and time and money.
It's filled with name-dropping and citation-dropping that most people won't recognize. Couldn't we ask whether in fact the theory of "flow" comes from Plotinus and not Heraclitus? Oh, and let's not forget my favourite quote from Heraclitus (I think): "Although reason is common to all men, most men behave as if they have their own private understanding".
When you have intimidating stuff like the invocation of Plotinus and Pliny, nobody might dare to say the obvious: but Evgeny, there isn't any software that has a message TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE. It doesn't exist. It's a sort of fable you've made, like your other fables.
Real software -- the ubiquitous Windows of the proprietary and much-hated Microsoft, on which everything is based -- simply says SAVE -- SAVE "as is", so to speak. Or you get the choice: "SAVE AS" -- and you *chose* then. Silicon Valley may not be as world-changing in its aspirations as you wish, at least without giving some agency to users! I can't think of a single application that actually says "TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE". Can you? Is this on a Mac or something? If it doesn't really exist anywhere, isn't that telling? It *might* -- it almost sounds as if it does! But it doesn't! (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
So yeah, I've been writing about the issue of the Silicon Valley hustlers for years and years on this blog and at Second Thoughts. But it's not like I'm vindicated with the appearance of the Sage of Soligorsk on the scene -- because it's like looking at the same landscape through a kaleidoscope, where everything is shifted 25% and skewed.
Each time Morozov is criticizing the same thing I've already criticized, and where he could point out their collectivism and -- dare I say it, technocommunism -- he shifts, and starts calling them some other name. Randians. Schumpeter-trumpeters. Or crypto-followers of some crazy Polish guy. Who in fact is no different in his scientism and socialism than H.G. Wells or Maxim Gorky, or for that matter, at the end of the day, Evgeny Morozov.
Oh, well, I get how it works, instead of working as a low-wage OSI worker for years on end, I should have been born in Eastern Europe and become a Soros fellow!
Still, for the record I'll note that I covered this topic back in 2008 when Morozov was still playing at being a Soros fellow or something, waiting for Lenny Benardo to give him research tips. (It's perhaps telling that Lenny Benardo absolutely refuses to speak about Belarus with me, because I might keep pointedly asking about the Soros mess-ups and question the priorities of grant-giving, whereas Lenny probably never has to talk to Morozov about Belarus, ever, because Morozov doesn't "do" Belarus, his homeland.)
Except to write his book at his parent's dacha there. Oh, the hissing samovar! The buzzing bees! The jam made by babushka from wild raspberries! And the skewering of Silicon Valley between sips of barely-diluted zavarka.
The kind of skewering I did without the summer house for years -- for example, confronting Jeff Jarvis both on his blog and in person about his "bill of rights" favouring collectivist ideas. Or having a long drawn-out battles about "gamification" back in 2008, when Jane McGonigal first appeared with this awful idea that "reality was broken" and that we had to gamify it to fix it, or the creepy TED talk about Jesse Schell sparked this debate in 2010.
Is Morozov going to mention that McGonigal worked for the Chinese government during their Olympics?
I had to sit through the vilification of being told even by a friend, Raph Koster, that my non-gamer culture and the culture of gamers (ostensibly superior) was the source of my problem with gamification -- and shunned because I dared to say that the deified Richard Bartle had social engineering-socialism in his games. I had to sit through legions of fanboyz villifying me because I dared to question the wackiness of McGonigal. Read it, it's truly extraordinary, in light especially of how much safer it has become now to criticize Jane.
With SL, Rosedale took the idea of reduced "coordination costs" to come up with this idyllic notion -- never put in practice:
By putting up a page where thousands of people can cast a fixed number of votes to prioritize (or modify) a fairly specific work list of features and changes for upcoming versions of Second Life, we are further blurring the boundaries between the ‘company’ of Linden Lab and the residents of Second Life. We are asking for help (and I suspect comitting ourselves substantially to what we hear) in what is generally a very private and hallowed process – the setting of development priorities.
Ultimately, Philip and his successors shut down the voting tool because people either asked for priorities the company, mindful of their competitors in the gaming industry, didn't think should be coded; or they didn't like some of the things asked for because they went against their geek religion; or they would prohibit the compay from being sold to marketers (i.e. IP masking). And this is how the whole Internet will go, as Second Life has often been used as a prototyper, deliberately or simply using its virtuality as an affordance for petri-dish work.
Back then, I asked whether a theory from efficient firms from 1937 was exactly the time period to be mining for ideas...In fact, the Taylorism that migrated into Stakhanovitism and later the Kaizen method in Japan was what we had to worry about -- was collectivizing everyone with open source software merely a way to reduce transaction costs for firms and ensure oligarchy for them, communism for the rest of us? You know, "We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us." So I had critiques like this one about the Leninism of the Linden Tao.
Now Morozov has produced a 16,000 word piece for The Baffler -- you wondered who they were going to get to write on tech after their co-editor Aaron Swartz killed himself. It's too long for a magazine piece and too short for a book, so it's a pamphlet of the sort socialists and the Catholic Church still specialize in -- where the author is erudite, wordy, didactic, and exasperated with the unbeliever.
Here's the nutshell of my critique of O'Reilly and his invasion of the State Department and government in general with his "gov 2.0" and even "civ soc 2.0":
Civil society is something I do know about, having studied it and lived it for 30 years. And open source and web 2.0 is something I know about, having studied it and lived it for the last 6 years. And I see something very destructive and corrosive that could occur by the arrogant imposition of the open source mystique and "business model" on to the more fragile and complex organic human systems of civil society that aren't mechanical like machines and the Internet.
It means monetarizing things for a few consultants -- like one man and his team that maybe shouldn't be monetarized (and don't pretend that the non-profit work of the O'Reilly empire is somehow unrelated to the expensive workbooks and conferences and the high human cost of open source in general).
It means low or no wages as a way of life and aspiration and necessity to keep work tools free for people that have high sources of compensation elsewhere.
But worse than all that, making everything into a stack and an ap means less freedom and less participation in decision-making, not more, *because the very decision about mechanization in the first place was ripped out of people's hands before they could think about it*.
Indeed, despite his enormous study of the subject, Morozov hasn't really touched on the corrosive effect of the "Code for America" stuff invading cities all over the place, a debate I took on in 2010 here.
And Morozov barely discusses the pernicious evangelist role of Alex Howard, who insists, against all common sense and logic and reason, that he is a journalist, and not a propagandist or public relations agent -- as I did here, after a lot of discussion on Whimsley, where Tom Slee confronted Howard on the entire "gov 2.0" racket which is exploited by conservative governments (and leftist governments, too, I might add, as Obama has abused it) to hand out consulting contracts to cronies and pretend to innovate and avoid hard topics.
(Of course, I haven't read the book all the way to the end yet, so maybe that's to come).
I'll come back to do a more thorough book review when I can, in which I explain that funny twist that happens with every single critique -- where Morozov misses the moment to recognize something as in fact "Soviet," shall we say, or collectivist, or socialist -- and then declares it something else. For example, you have to wonder -- how did he get through his critique of Clay Shirky, whom he skewers, without ever mentioning his seminal "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" -- which might really be re-titled, as I've written repeatedly for years, "The Group Members Are Our Own Worst Enemy". And to miss Shirky's one big forray into foreign policy on the webzine of the same name, from his areas of expertise in Internet culture, where essentially, he tells people to forego their Twitter revolutions until the advance guard tells them it's okay, because they've become sufficiently mature for democracy -- an ideology Nazarbayev would be proud of, and in fact invokes (and maybe that's how he was able to win over Jimmy Wales).
For now, let's just look at the things hidden in the 16,000 word piece about O'Reilly.
Morozov decides O'Reilly is a Randian, because he's for entrepreneurs forging their businesses in the face of conservative big, ostensibly backward, proprietary-software companies. I guess Morozov never studied the role of the peredovik in Soviet culture and the winners of socialist competitions.
Ayn Rand, of course, is as Bolshevist as the Bolsheviks she countered, and she got that way having to counter them fiercely, but she's a product of her time and copies their revolutionary methods. The rigidity of her ideology; her hatred of religion; her relentless ideological struggle with other sectarians or the slightly-politically-incorrect within her own circles -- these are all products of the Bolshevik age we still live with. If someone worked harder in the collective farm of open software and also figured out how to make money with the $39.95 manuals to actually work this "free" stuff and also charged big speaking fees, they merit a spot in the Soviet Union of Constructors, not a blast as a Randian or hypothetically an exaggerated capitalist.
O'Reilly's earlier nods to Microsoft or to a hypothetical "choice" between open and proprietary software, even defending it as an intellectual freedom, was only tactical and only present 10 years ago. Today, Code for America culture adherents deride as "vendorocracy" any proprietary software that a municipality runs, and as we see from Cyrus Farivar's uneven critical examination of Code for America on Ars Technica, somebody making a zippy little startup with open source software and getting the city contract ahead of others is the "good guy" whereas those other contenders are evil (or companies that *should* be contending if you still kept a free-market competition system and competitive bids at city hall instead of ecstatic free software cronyism).
O'Reilly peddled that line only tactically for a time, like the pro-abortion crusaders used "choice" for a time until they could change their causes' title to "women's health" and beat any critic as wishing the illness of women and waging a war on women. So O'Reillyites at State today would describe as backward and fearful of technology and consumed with FUD anybody who suggests that an older vendor with proprietary software not as caught up in the giddyness of 2.0 might be better for security or privacy.
But here's the thing about Evgeny -- he loves open source software. He himself is not for the intellectual proposition of choice between types of software, even tactically until the Better Day comes. In this Baffler essay that many will read and write about as "a critique of the open source software culture" that is invading everything (and thinking it can even use the sectarian principles of agile software production on governance of people in general), in fact, Morozov roots most vigorously for just that -- in a more pure form unalloyed with any capitalism
Morozov is more of a Stallmanite that Stallman. He pretends to admit that Stallman is obviated by being preoccupied with licensing schemes at a time when "the cloud" has obviated them.
Of course, "the cloud" has done no such thing, as proprietary cloud software can exist; private firms deploy their cloud magic even with open source in ways they don't publish; and big companies still fiercely fight over what the standards of cloudness will be. At the end of the day, the cloud is just other people's computers, not your own. There should be a new study of server farms and server farm politics underneath the cloud, that Morozov hasn't gotten to yet.
Stallman isn't about license schemes, really -- he's more of a cultural coder than O'Reilly precisely because he hasn't converted his empire, still very active (with the friends of Bradley Manning, for example) into a cash cow in the same way and therefore has more street cred. The Stallmanite ideals -- that everything has to be free, that bugs are shallow to the thousands of eyes let in to see that software, in fact is something Morozov exhuberantly proclaims, with this telling paragraph:
Underpinning Stallman’s project was a profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity. Perhaps inadvertently, Stallman also made a prescient argument for treating code, and technological infrastructure more broadly, as something that ought to be subject to public scrutiny. He sought to open up the very technological black boxes that corporations conspired to keep shut. Had his efforts succeeded, we might already be living in a world where the intricacies of software used for high-frequency trading or biometric identification presented no major mysteries
Now that's just sectarian clap-trap of the sort we thought Morozov was supposed to be critiquing, not embracing. See what I mean? There's a strange technno-determinism of the sort Morozov is supposed to be denouncing if he believes that "if only" we could see the magic code that enables traders to use the speed and amplification properties of the Internet to move markets perilously (to their own profit and sometimes to the detriment of countries), why, we could somehow cure the faults of capitalism. But the Internet is merely (sometimes) a capitalist tool, and the real problem for Morozov which he most decidedly disdains is capitalism and free enterprise and free markets themselves. Sure, capitalism should be regulated even in a free society with free enterprise -- and it is, and the debate about "how much" is what politics is about. Here, I suspect Morozov thinks that "transparency" on the kind of software some capitalists have made good use of will somehow enable a naming and shaming (or industrial sabotage?) effort or an "equalling of the playing field"...or some other socialist fantasy.
But in a free world, you have to ask why traders can't have proprietary software that gives them an edge in trading fast, and if your real problem is capitalism itself, this particular facet of it really isn't the issue; and if your real problem is that you just want to regulate some of the fiercest aspects of capitalism that can be destructive, you've never explained why you couldn't do this with organic law instead of transparency of the code to those putative million eyes.
As for biometrics, something that states from South Korea to Turkmenistan are using now -- while gas-rich Turkmenistan may not be able to supply clean water and jobs and even gas to all of its people, especially in remote areas, it has seen fit to rush to apply the latest scientific methods to create a biometric passport of the future -- and control its citizenry.
Knowing the software code that probably the Chinese wrote for the Turkmens or knowing the code of what might be implemented in the US won't change anything -- what's at stake here is the will of the government, its undemocratic nature, and its resorting to organic methods of control as well as electronic.
Morozov's critique of Silicon Valley-orchestrated collectivism -- yes, he does come up with an actual critique of collectivism now in rather a cunning way -- is that it is soulless. It's not "true" collectivism. That's because all it is, really, is a zillion individual actions -- clicks on likes, or retweeting of messages or copying of memes or whatever the individual act is -- without any sense of camraderie or joint purpose.Says Morozov:
This is a very limited vision of participation. It amounts to no more than a simple feedback session with whoever is running the system. You are not participating in the design of that system, nor are you asked to comment on its future. There is nothing “collective” about such distributed intelligence; it’s just a bunch of individual users acting on their own and never experiencing any sense of solidarity or group belonging. Such “participation” has no political dimension; no power changes hands.
If you hold up a mirror to this paragraph to see what, then, Morozov might find ideal, not only might he himself disappear, but you see the yearning for collectivism nevertheless straining through as an ideal: It would be great if we did have collectives, just better, more meaningful collectives! It would be great if they actually democratically participated! It would be cause if they had a sense of solidarity and group belonging! It would be even better if they had a "political dimension" and actually took power! Hey, let's Occupy Wall Street with that!
I'm not talking about libertarian survivalism here and the lone individual on the range -- I'm just criticizing bureaucratic socialism. Really, how does Morozov's "better" group with solidarity differ from, oh, the Leninist notion of "democratic centralism" (the Politburo can debate, but nobody else) or Central Asian notion of the kuraltai (very free group debates with even the powerless included until the power-possessors decide after sifting out what they see as "the voice of the people" and then ruthlessly silencing all further debate) -- or Chinese "self-criticism" circles?
Morozov is still celebrating the group and its dynamics; he doesn't have a vision of the protection of individual rights or the protection of minorities, or how to change the group afterward, when it becomes "its own worst enemy", i.e. strays from the rigid ideal that may have been once "collectively" decided. What is the theory of change that really constitutes democracy, not just a glorification of "participation" that leads us to "participatory democracy" where the cadres end up deciding everything? Because not everybody participates. Because not everybody can or should have a stake. Why should a bunch of jobless students get to overthrow the stock market?
So I'd make a sharper critique of this Silicon Valley "collective intelligence" stuff than Morozov by pointing out --again -- the pernicious thinking of Clay Shirky in "The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy" which is really about how straying group members who revolt against non-democratically decided goals should be controlled -- or Beth Noveck, who thinks you can't have "here comes everybody" (which Shirky himself disavowed later) because you get people who aren't appropriate or are off-topic or are too stupid -- which is why a network of self-selecting experts under her guidance and filtration is the best kind of collective. You know, "the cadres decide everything," as Stalin put it so well. And he should know; despite being called "rude" by Lenin, he was eventually able to take over everything just by performing the simple task of keeping the minutes for meetings (and shaping them subtly) -- sort of writing the code for the group, if you will...
Of course, there's plenty of sense of joint purpose to go around among the Internet socialists on their campaigns, but I've generally found that the groups like Moveon or Daily Kos or Organizing for America are cadre-run, with the masses seldom having any real choice but to enthusiastically "like" and retweet what is peddled to them by a few cunning intellectuals at the top of the pyramid.
Morozov should be troubled by the bureaucratic socialism of Moveon or Center for American Progress, too, but never is.
And for him, the ideal of the collective still shines goldenly on the yawning heights:
As a result, once-lively debates about the content and meaning of specific reforms and institutions are replaced by governments calling on their citizens to help find spelling mistakes in patent applications or use their phones to report potholes. If Participation 1.0 was about the use of public reason to push for political reforms, with groups of concerned citizens coalescing around some vague notion of the shared public good, Participation 2.0 is about atomized individuals finding or contributing the right data to solve some problem without creating any disturbances in the system itself. (These citizens do come together at “hackathons”—to help Silicon Valley liberate government data at no cost—only to return to their bedrooms shortly thereafter.) Following the open source model, citizens are invited to find bugs in the system, not to ask whether the system’s goals are right to begin with. That politics can aspire to something more ambitious than bug-management is not an insight that occurs after politics has been reimagined through the prism of open source software.
Again holding up the mirror and thinking about the shining heights, you see the recipe for the real Better World:
o challenge the entire system of capitalism -- it's time, comrades!
o have the code contributions disturb the system -- how about apps to name and shame every contributor to the mayor's campaign and dox them?
o take on issues much bigger than potholes -- why not march and demonstrate right in front of Jamie Dimon's house?
o don't go home to your bedrooms after your hackathon, camp in a tent on the square
And so on. In other words, Morozov is merely annoyed that O'Reilly, like the 1970s head shop owners, capitalizing on the zeitgeist of the SDS 1960s, began to profit from the sale of bong pipes and posters and black lights, is derailing the Revolution by selling open source software as something grafted on to capitalism -- at least, capitalism for some people in Sillicon Valley.
He castigates O'Reilly for seeming to "hate" protests -- by which he means, again, O'Reilly's actual cooptation of the antagonistic group dyanmics so often available online into "patch or GTFO" coder culture operations. He then picks anodyne things to work on -- a park -- rather than anything that might substantively challenge either politics as usual (which Morozov seems to believe is "bought out by corporate interests) or the socialist theories of the 1960s and 1970s (Ilyich) that rule the unions and the schools and are profoundly challenged by schemes like school vouchers.
Interestingly, O'Reilly mentions the Moldova Twitter protests in that piece positively -- up to a point:
The internet provides new vehicles for collective action. A lot of people pay attention when social media is used to organize a protest (as with the recent twitter-fueled protests in Moldova.) But we need to remember that we can organize to do work, as well as to protest!
He might as well be Lukashenka (never challenged by Morozov) telling the intellectuals to stop babbling in the cafes in the city and help bring in the potato harvest. Time to stop complaining and work, comrades! Patch or GTFO! In fact, the Twitter protests didn't lead to solutions of protracted problems caused by the Russians, like Transdniester.
Morozov's critique of O'Reilly, if he weren't burdened by his own idealistic vision of collectivism, could involve calling out the cadres who decide everything in gov 2.0, whether the Sunlight Foundation or the latest Google staff or collectivist academics installed in various White House agencies. That's what I do. Morozov doesn't, because his target is conservative Western governments that get in the way of old-time socialism, and to some extent, the Kremlin's agenda -- like the Cameron government in Londongrad. Hence gripey paragraphs like this:
At the same time that he celebrated the ability of “armchair auditors” to pore through government databases, he also criticized freedom of information laws, alleging that FOI requests are “furring up the arteries of government” and even threatening to start charging for them. Francis Maude, the Tory politician who Cameron put in charge of liberating government data, is on the record stating that open government is “what modern deregulation looks like” and that he’d “like to make FOI redundant.” In 2011, Cameron’s government released a white paper on “Open Public Services” that uses the word “open” in a peculiar way: it argues that, save for national security and the judiciary, all public services must become open to competition from the market.
Market competition might be a good thing -- say, in competing for software contracts. I've often wondered if that enormously expensive boondoggle on the time-clock software for the City of New York was open or proprietary software, and what that story was really all about -- even if it turns out that the software is proprietary, the notion of the endless chain of experts required to keep it working because people can't be empowered to run it themselves normally seems to be at the heart of the problem. And the problem with New York City is in fact that it has outsourced to nonprofits and religious groups too much of the work of managing difficult populations that it needs to keep under one roof and monitored and kept transparent to the public far, far more than it does.
If you can get through the 16,000 words, you will be left with this: unadulterated worship of Stallman -- indeed, a fresh appreciation of Stallmanism with all the zeal of a new convert:
Once the corporate world began expressing interest in free software, many nonpolitical geeks sensed a lucrative business opportunity. As technology entrepreneur Michael Tiemann put it in 1999, while Stallman’s manifesto “read like a socialist polemic . . . I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise.” Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types. Stallman didn’t care about offending the suits, as his goal was to convince ordinary users to choose free software on ethical grounds, not to sell it to business types as a cheaper or more efficient alternative to proprietary software. After all, he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association.
But...go back to that socialism part. That was what was wrong with it in the first place.
I noticed that there was one of those "promoted tweets" showing up in my feed from something called @meanstinks.
This account with its more than 26,000 followers isn't something you might figure out right away, but it's basically a marketing campaign by Secret deodorant against bullying -- sort of a public service campaign.
Since launching the "Mean Stinks" program, which has also included a
publicity tie-in with "Glee's" Amber Riley and an iAd campaign launched
last month, Secret's already strong sales growth kicked up a notch. The
brand had momentum anyway, with a current streak of 17 consecutive
quarters of share growth, according to P&G. Sales are up 8% to
around $250 million in channels tracked by SymphonyIRI for the 52 weeks
ended July 10, but they're up an even faster 9% for the 26 weeks ended
June 26, a period affected by the "Mean Stinks" campaign that launched
in January on Facebook. Secret, already the leading U.S. deodorant, saw
its share rise 0.6 points for the past 52 weeks and 0.7 points for the
first half of 2011.
So...social media "engagement," even encouraging people to give $1 to an anti-bullying charity -- is really about improvement of the bottom line.
I find this creepy. And remember, I'm not the socialist around here, I don't hate corporations or business. It reminds me of humdog's famous article "Pandora's Vox" which I critiqued as being too anti-capitalist at the time -- from her first days at the Well, she chronicled how all of us online personas were being milked for all our thoughts and hopes and dreams to be exploited in marketing campaigns.... I guess I had never thought of how bad it could get, even though I remain a supporter of capitalism and think overall, Carmen (Montserrat Tovar in Second Life) was too socialist...although she came back to her religion towards the end of her life...
In any event, I don't like the anti-bullying campaigns because they are too vague, too shallow, and too baggy -- they can apply to almost anything anywhere. When bullies are everywhere, they are nowhere. Often, "bullying" seems to mean something about hating gays -- but then that means if you question anything about the way that some aggressive gay activists are pursuing their cause by boycotting or trying to silence other groups they don't like, why, you're the "bully" then -- even if what they do would be classified as bullying in anyone else's hands.
Sometimes bullying is about somebody being "different" in school -- but it's a sliding concept that can differ from state to state or situation to situation -- whatever someone decides who can get the news media -- and more importantly, social media -- on it. Sometimes it's really serious, cases culminating in suicide - horrible situations. Other times it seems to erode the significance of the need to fight such serious cases by being merely something "mean" said on Facebook. If bullying is everything from humiliating a rape victim to causing somebody to commit suicide, to causing somebody to get their feelings hurt because of a failure to like something on Facebook -- how can we combat it? We can't -- we can only helplessly fall into the hands of managers who will be sure to follow every twist and turn of the party line on this matter...
These campaigns and their witless boosters on social media are awfully manipulative and shallow and stupid. I see the campaigns as kind of an open source meme that are now being both exploited by corporations (like Procter & Gamble) to use in faux "public interest" campaigns that are merely sales campaigns, and also exploited by the counterculturalists like Anonymous, which makes much of "bullies" now in their own reputational laundering exercises. (If you ever wanted a really good definition of online bully, you'd have no further to look than 4chan and the behaviour of all the creeps like Weev -- and yet recently with the Steubenville #JusticeSec campaign, Anonymous was pretending they lead the charge against "bullies" -- which can include anyone who criticizes their past or present vigilantism.)
To Anonymous, and to Procter & Gamble (and they are symbiotic), everybody is a victim of a "bully". There are bullies everywhere! The P&G account @meanstinks claims there are 2.1 million bullies in America (!), and that's where I had to ask: but where do you get those numbers?
I never got an answer, although somebody said "Parent Magazine" -- like that's a source?!
There are about 100,000 public schools in American, and about 33,000 private schools. So that would make 15 bullies per school! One of those scant-looking new accounts with few followers -- those accounts you suspect are made by the gadzillions by the propagandists who run these campaigns from either P&G or Anonymous -- said "that number is low". I tried to think of every school I'd ever been in myself, or where my children or relatives have been in. I just couldn't concede that each of these schools had "fifteen bullies".
So...nonsense. The number is ridiculous, ill-defined, and it's all stupid. Who are these bullies? People who don't get with either the totalitarian Anonymous program or the ad agency's superficial campaign to sell deodorant?
It would be better if people could identify more the behaviour or methods of bullying -- you know, what Anonymous and Adria Rich had in common in last week's scandal -- than decide certain people are to be labelled as "bullies" and then ostracized "from the community" (which is bullying itself).
I knew it would take only about 6 tweets before these anonymous and unaccountable personas would lable me a bully merely because I questioned these crazy numbers -- and the entire craze of making kids feel like they are victims and have to fight these mysterious armies of 2.1 bullies who exist because the figures of authority in their world don't do their jobs? Or? Are afraid of lawsuits if they do more than tell the little darlings they have to "use words"?
One person attacking me because I questioned the meme campaign had an account with a name like "QueerFlag" or something and claimed that there was "hetereosexual apartheid" in America because not everyone was getting behind the lastest campaign for gay rights. After a few rounds, I didn't hesitate to identify this person as a loon, because we're in a huge tide in fact that is finding more support for gay marriage and gay marriage rights in many states and the issue is even being examined now by the Supreme Court. Regardless of this or that temporary loss of the battle for equal rights, it has turned a corner.
Yet talking in terms of "apartheid" is just crazy -- there is no such thing. Get a grip. Look at Syria. Realize you are not in some oppressed hell. No one has stopped you from doing whatever you want -- you're hysterically fantasizing about oppression on Twitter because ad agencies and Anonymous are ginning up meme campaigns. Criticizing your crazy notion that there is "heterosexual apartheid" in America isn't "being a bully"; you're the bully for thinking you can put over such arrant nonsense as politically-correct straitjackets we must all don.
Then...Who needs separate nonprofit charities or government agencies when you can have corporations and social media do the work of helping society and making a "Better World"? Says Ad Age:
The Mean Stinks Facebook page also includes a referral page for
counseling centers, some positive video shoutouts from Ms. Riley, a
section where women can upload video apologies or complaints about past
acts of meanness, and a store that sells T-shirts with anti-bullying
messages (along with links promoting F-commerce sales of other Secret and other P&G products).
"We're more than just products and brands, but we're actually doing
something meaningful for our consumers," said P&G spokeswoman Laura
Brinker.
Really, Laura? How are you measuring this? How can we evaluate it?
Part of the meme train is to get people to paint their pinkie fingernails blue. I'm not sure why. "Pinkie promise" is a concept that teenage girls sometimes invoke. Blue -- as in blue jeans -- seems to be the colour of this campaign. Just to be different, I've had all 10 of my toenails painted blue. You can never be too careful....
If you look at the Facebook account, and read some of the tweets, too, you see that middle-aged women still reliving their bullying traumas are as represented as some teens. I've also noticed that a few enterprising and aspiring hip-hop artists have seized the meme train to try to get attention to their videos. I thought this one by Tae Stax had a great name -- Fake Friends, Real Enemies. Don't we all have them! And any one of them could become a bully at any time!!!
There's kind of a mania about Chinese hackers now, now that the liberal bastion of the New York Times and the conservative bastion of The Wall Street Journal have been hacked by the Chinese themselves. That's what it takes -- the WSJ was better at reporting Hurricane Sandy because they could look out the window and see the flooding and their power went off; the New York Times was in NoPo, as the area is now jokingly called, not SoPo (north of power or south of power) -- the cut- off was 42nd Street.
Now it seems as if the Chinese are everywhere -- but they were always everywhere. There were people warning of them years ago (me). In 2011, Vanity Fair had a huge expose of the Chinese hackers and the incredible damage they do to both corporate and government web sites. The mainstream daily news didn't much pick up the story and the tech press was absolutely silent about it because China is their gadget manufacturing factory.
I don't think that Chinese hacking can be isolated from the other issues of Internet governance, however. You can't have L. Gordon Crovitz giving a bully pulpit to Google's Andrew McLaughlin to "break the kneecaps" of international bodies like the ITU over copyright, and then expect the world to do something about Chinese hacking. These things all emanate from the same problem: the legal nihilism of the communist regimes and the continued legal nihilism of their successors today, even if they aren't as communist as they used to be. The solution to Chinese hacking can't be artificially compartmentalized from the problem of piracy and hacking in other areas -- they all go together.
Hence my comment to the WSJ editorial that tries to put the focus on the content and the reporting -- as if Chinese hacking in their case was only about how they covered a government scandal. The WJS is a business; as such, it is a target for the Chinese Communist Party, Inc. to attack -- full stop. Every business person in America and many in the world reads it every day. The WSJ says:
The larger question is why the Chinese do this and what the regime's spying compulsions say about what it is.
In an op-ed in these pages last year, Mike McConnell, Michael Chertoff and William Lynn noted that "The Chinese government has a national policy of economic espionage in cyberspace." The three former national security officials chalked this up to Beijing's need for rapid economic growth to improve the lot of its people. "It is much more efficient for the Chinese to steal innovations and intellectual property," they wrote, "than to incur the cost and time of creating their own."
The answer to your question of why Chinese hackers do their hacking is easy: because they can.
And the answer to why this happened to you is easy too: because you haven't taken the problem of hacking seriously enough and worked to prevent and mitigate it better.
The problem of hacking is often seen as merely a technological problem, that you need better IT people or products or expensive consultants.
But the first place to tackle hacking is in your mindset and your editorial board and your corporate culture.
And there, things are rotten because your young colleagues in particular have accepted copyleftism as a component of their culture which they radically defend; they have opposed SOPA and they have written news and editorial pieces attacking the efforts of any body, at home or abroad, to control piracy. Hackers are cheered as "freedom fighters" that might be protecting your Libertarians from losing your freedom instead of the anarchist Leninist-Marxists that you as *the Wall Street* Journal should be rejecting.
THAT is where the problem begins: a failure to understand the *ideological* side of the problem of a casual regard to property and property rights merely because they are digital. That's what you have to fix first. The rest will follow.
When you're ready to let writers like L. Gordon Corwitz stop dog-whistling to Kim Dotcom supporters and Google lobbyists ilke Andrew McLaughlin; when you're ready to stop golf-clapping WikiLeaks and letting Julie Angwin report only on the fears of government intrusion into social media and rarely the destructiveness of Anonymous, then you will be less of a target. It's just that simple.
***
Watch out for Eric Schmidt's solution to the problem he is finally admitting (Google didn't going into China or staying in China for years until their own servers were directly dinged). I suspect Eric wants Google to take over the state (it already has a revolving door) although he's less naked about it than Sergey Brin, who advocates for an end to political parties and governance on the Internet. For now, Eric is content to have this solution, in the words of a BBC review: "Western governments could do more to follow China's lead and develop
stronger relationships between the state and technology companies." This is why all those human rights organizations that joined the Google-dominated GNI were providing cover for something antithetical to freedom and human rights.
P.S. I remember the early days of email on the Internet in the mid-1990s when a tekkie swore to me that an attachment could "never" carry a virus. Boy, was he wrong. So when the stories began to surface of how software could penetrate the hardware of infrastructures, I paid attention, was sneered at by tekkies that "this couldn't happen here," took on some breathless Internet bloggers here, and today read that yes, power infrastructure can indeed be attacked. Bloomberg will report on this seriously; obviously the Onion won't, and lets us know an underlying attitude in the tech set -- "I for one welcome our new overlords."
A video made by a student named Jake Hammon for his history class, at BucsFan2276· While he and his teacher may have hoped to create a video inspiring a new generation to revolution for "peace," they can't help telling a story of a violent, chaotic, and sectarian movement.
Well, it was all there to be seen, as I pointed out. A disturbing gas-lighting, as I call it -- moving the memes just ever-so-slightly. Taking in fact the collectivist approach, by trying to sneak into folksy Americana notions of "collective action" the planks of the hard left -- and doing a switcheroo between those "we the people" notions in long-established cultural monuments like the Constitution, and socialist memes.
I thought it was particularly atrocious that Obama said that "the most self-evident truth" (as if there is a hierarchy -- there isn't!) was that "all men are created equal". But the next sentence is just as self-evident and arguably needs to be "most self-evident" because it explains how you get there: "they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalieable rights". Therefore, when you *do* find inequality -- between men and women, between whites and blacks, between hetereosexuals and homosexuals -- you don't just impose uravnilovka (levelling out); you invoke *rights*.
That, BTW, is the essential difference between the socialist revolutionary and the liberal human rights advocate so I think it's really important.
Those rights -- "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are all things that the state has to *get out of the way of*, and not supply. They are inherent. That's why the First Amendment goes "Congress shall make no law..."
Of course, as Mitt Romney discovered, and David Corn confirmed in Mother Jones, 47% of the people rely on the government in some way and tend to think of the government's job as redistributive, rather than to get out of the way of the generative capacity of the private economy. There just isn't that faith in the private sector that there once was after the banking scandals and the recession, and more and more of both the immigrant population and the first and second generations of new Americans are leaning to the socialist explanation for society. The New York Times published a Pew poll that showed, for example, Hispanics in their 20s more favourable to socialism and Hispanics in their 40s less favourable. I think this will change over time as the populations grow older and more established and have investments in small and medium business.
In any event, Obama has been waiting for the day, after spending decades in the socialist trenches hiding behind single issues (the strategy of the Democratic Socialists of America and other socialist organizations of the 1980s during his college days), when he can spout these memes and have them resonate.
Now along comes John Judis in the newly-revamped New Republic, now owned by the Facebook billionaire Chris Huges who also made himself editor, something publishers generally don't do, unless they really, really need to turn an East Coast liberal establishment institution into a beach-head for Silicon Valley's technocommunist revolution.
Interestingly, Judis speaks, as I do, of a sleight of hand in this Inaugural Address.
But Judis is a self-avowed socialist -- even the hard-core Port Huron sort from the early days of the Students for a Democratic Society (Tom Hayden's radical organization). To be sure, he acknowledged the SDS "excesses" and became an In These Times socialist, even an editor of that paper, which is more critical of the Soviet style of communism.
A single dissenting voice risked "derision," in his words, by insisting that "once the sordid memory of Soviet communism is laid to rest and the fervor of anti-government hysteria abates, politicians and intellectuals of the next century will once again draw openly upon the legacy of socialism."
I was that lone dissenter. In the 1960s, I had been a member of the radical antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and even after that organization descended into violence and chaos, I kept the faith alive and edited a Marxist theoretical journal that advocated democratic socialism. Subsequently, I suffered my share of disillusionment with Marx and socialism, but I never bought into the facile view that the collapse of Soviet communism had altogether relegated these ideas to the dustbin of history.
Um, okay. For most people, even in Russia, where there is still a very hardy communist contingent, these ideas *are* in the dustbin. They aren't for people who had to live under "really existing socialism".
So...what's the sleight of hand that bothers Judis?
Well, he doesn't mention the "s-word" in this TNR piece -- Judis isn't that stupid to reveal his hand to that extent or use a discredited word whose taint will likely never be removed in America. Here's what he says:
Much of Obama’s speech can be read as a justification for a strong
national government—to provide Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security,
to meet “the threat of climate change,” to ensure and promote economic
and social equality, to build roads, and to devise rules to ensure
“competition and fair play.” But Obama doesn’t talk straightforwardly
about the need for a strong national government. He praises instead “our
skepticism of central authority.”
He could have said "socialism" instead of the misleading "strong national government"; he didn't because he is still playing the 1980s game of stealth socialism.
Ah, so you would never know that he isn't banging on Obama for not being socialist enough; what's happening here is that he is chastising Obama for doing the socialist meme switcheroo, but not coming clean with it, and still ambiguously giving the nod to traditional American politics that are anti-communist -- and with good reason. He wants Obama not to duck and cover -- he wants him to come out for "strong nationalist government" so he can slip in the content -- socialism.
To sort of justify what Obama is doing, but just not doing enough of, Judis then gives a tendentious view of American history to suit his socialist belief system:
This rhetorical sleight of hand goes back to the debates between the
Federalists and Anti-Federalists over the Constitution. (I borrow here
liberally from Gordon Wood’s fine book The Creation of the American
Republic, 1776-1787). In arguing for a strong national government (with
aristocratic components) as opposed to the weak state-based government
laid out in the Articles of Confederation, the Federalists invoked the
idea of popular sovereignty and “we the people.”
Popular sovereignty had a strong democratic, egalitarian ring to it
that was borrowed from the rhetoric of the anti-Federalists, but its
real purpose was to discredit the anti-Federalists’ idea of state
sovereignty.
This revisionism makes it seem like "we the people" was never really a core, authentic principle, but only wielded by Federalists. Boo, hiss!
Judis has caught on to the Obama shill -- he realizes that Obama is coming just up to the edge of creepy socialism (not creepy for Judis) but not really delivering. I'm castigating Obama for even going that far, as he is deliberately mangling language and meaning by trying to convert "We the People" into a collective farm when they aren't.
Says Judis:
Obama uses the phrase “we the people” and the promise of collective
action to avoid a direct justification of what government can or should
do. It’s familiar and pleasing rhetoric, and, in Obama’s case, is in the
service of a democratic rather than an aristocratic conception of
government. But it ultimately avoids the central question of government
that has plagued American politics since 1787 and created nothing but
grief for Obama himself during his first term when Tea Party activists
invoked the phrase to justify their individualist or states-rights
interpretation of democracy.
Well, patience, John, he's going to get to your socialism and is already almost there. He's gaslighting with language. First, 45 degrees movement to the left, then he can go 90 another time. First establish that "we the people" means "collective action" (which it doesn't; it means individuals with rights who come together as free people -- different). Then later, he can swap out "collective action" for "collectivism" or simply "the government" in a socialist vision. "We're hear to help."
The comments don't bring clarity or relief -- you have to be a paying subscriber to leave them, and I won't support this Silicon Valley hustle at TNR now. They are the usual sectarians squabbling with each other about Tea Party stuff or history and not confronting the real problem of the import of this Marxism to our shores and Judis' long, long history of writing and speaking to try to bring a kinder, gentler version of the Soviet variant into reality.
Yes, you can keep portraying the political struggle in America as about "more government" or "less government" but it's really more about whether you have *a socialist government* or *a capitalist government*. I'm not kidding. Either you have a theory of socialism that eventually kills the golden egg you are redistributing, or you have a theory of capitalism that is democratic and liberal, not Randian (as "the Internet" always hysterically imagines it is), that may have social services, but that does not cripple the private sector with the burden of the 47% such that it can't regenerate. You don't have to be a Randian or even a Friedmanite to appreciate that business can't be too heavily taxed or it closes.
Enter Bobby Jindal and his recent speech. As governor of Louisiana, he is one of the Republican leaders now stumping for the GOP to reform and get away from that obsessiveness about social issues like abortion and rape and gay rights, where they've all made fools of themselves, and focus on what he thinks the GOP does best: preach small government and entrepreneurialism.
James Taranto has nothing but a sneer, oddly -- but I think this is cultural: I think not only does this wealthy Wall Street Journal columnist in the urban hipster setting of New York City loathe Bobby Jindal from the fly-over state; I think it's about white guys versus brown guys, too -- I'm not sure all the white guys are comfortable with the brown guys who turn out not to be socialists, but capitalists. We see how this works on the frantic and furious left, where the lone black conservative who joined Congress recently got nearly lynch-mobbed by the politically correct people of colour on the hill for not being "representative" in the way they thought he should be (96% of blacks voted for Obama). But I think it works on the right, too.
I began to think about all this when I began to ask myself: why do the business people from Silicon Valley, all of whom are entrepreneurs, side with Obama, the redistributionist and collectivist, instead of with the businessman Romney or with the Republican Party emphasizing the entrepreneurial over government?
Ponder it, if you will. It's not like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs don't want capitalism for themselves, even if they preach that "Better World" socialist stuff for everyone else.
Oh.
I think I have it now -- if the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are to keep having that capitalism-for-me-socialism-for-thee with all those free platforms and aps and freemiums and expensive gadgets to watch all of it, they need somebody to pay for their customers.
They don't think of how their products fit into an American world of small business and large business in other sectors that they serve -- say, machine tools or trucks or Xerox toner, or on the consumer side, say, like car, or vacuum cleaner or cereal manufacturers thought of the consumer, "the customer who is always right".
No, the things that Silicon Valley makes are invisible and ephemeral, and when you help yourself to them, you aren't richer, but often poorer. They try very hard to make a hustle around "innovation" coming from things like "crowd-sourced" business -- where you do the work for free and they pretend to pay you at least with a free platform. But then the platform gets eaten by a bigger thing and your work evaporates.
In any event, it struck me that in ways that the titans of the past never had to, the current entrepreneurs need to have the government keep their customers alive for another day. And their ideology of a Better World in any event is more about remaking everything to be free, shareable, takeable without penalty, etc. and not about interlocking with other viable business. There's also this: all of these new software-based social media companies and Big IT like Google, soaking wet, don't even make up as much staff hires as one big hardware-based sort of company like GM that still makes cars and still hires a lot of people. But the reason they call it the Rust Belt is that these jobs are shipped overseas -- yes, in fact the jeeps are to be manufactured in China, when they could have been manufactured in the US, and to serve not just China, but the growing Asian market, when they could have served it from here. Romney didn't lie, he just told the truth a little earlier and a little more long-term than anyone wanted to admit. Japan makes their cars in their own country, you know? They don't have Uzbeks make them to serve the region (like GM does in Uzbekistan).
Taranto, who is awfully smart and very good, and who I find to be right almost all the time, was sure flat-footed on Jindal. He didn't seem to quote him right. Here's one section on this issue:
We believe in creating abundance, not redistributing scarcity.
We should let the other side try to sell Washington’s ability to help
the economy, while we promote the entrepreneur, the risk-taker, the
self-employed woman who is one sale away from hiring her first employee.
Let the Democrats sell the stale power of more federal programs, while we promote the rejuvenating power of new businesses.
I have a suggestion for Bobbie Jindal, however -- he's going to have to get hard and mean about this just like the Democrats were, and he's going to have to take on Silicon Valley frontally and with full force to point out how much they are the problem and the engineers of the socialism we have now.
It isn't just just that Google and their people coded up the GOTV stuff and concocted the narratives and got the demographics. They were all there to be had given the Republican's bad story-telling. It's that Google and Facebook and all have a concept of America that really does mean oligarchy for them and socialism for the rest of us, that really does need a strong central government to do things to "help innovation" *cough* like lay out broadband in rural areas to help Google Ad Agency have more clickers.
Jindal sounds almost like a Gov 2.0 evangelist when he says this in his speech:
If any rational human being were to create our government anew,
today, from a blank piece of paper – we would have about one fourth of
the buildings we have in Washington and about half of the government
workers.
We would replace most of its bureaucracy with a handful of good websites.
The reality is that he will not befriend Silicon Valley by coming up with an idea like this that would involve firing, oh, 50,000 government clerks in Washington, DC, many of them blacks and Hispanics, and leaving them jobless with no place to go (Google or Twitter don't have a place for them). What the left of the Michael Moore or Katrina Vanden Heuval or John Judis type have absorbed is that big government=jobs for ordinary people that might not have anywhere else to go, i.e. at the Post Office or the Motor Vehicles Department or Health and Human Services. So you're not going to touch that, because the old style socialist left will explain it all to Mitch Kapor and he will never go for replacing bureaucrats and buildings with web sites and Second Life.
Instead, Jindal needs to craft a more complex message that calls out Silicon Valley for never creating jobs despite all their "innovation" and the government in their pocket -- they aren't really generative capitalism at the end of the day and that has to be said out loud. Are they degenerative capitalists who can't keep their customers alive? They're merely a higher-level redistributive system among big players like the venture capitalists. He should challenge them to bring their taxes home and invest more in communities - because the Democrats don't do that, and he could do it as a solution to not creating bigger government and draining people and businesses of more taxes here. Jindal is going in the right direction when he blasts the fake green business/professorial nexus that just pockets grants and then fails -- he should just add the social media crash to this narrative.
For extra credit, you can study more of the sectarian fight here where Rod Radosh, and old socialist, points out that Judis' mentar, Martin Sklar, in fact would advocate Bush as a leftist liberal (imagine):
Bush’s in contrast, was based on a lower-tax, low-cost energy,
“high-growth/job stimulus” program, and was not “ensnared in the green
business/academia lobby agenda of high-cost energy,” which would work to
both restrict economic growth and workers’ incomes.
Ron Radosh wrote this before the fracking explosion and the changes in the natural gas market, and it would be interesting to see if the lower costs of energy would make this possible.
While this may be overheated, it has the elements of the Obama problem of 'we the people" and "civil society" conceived as government-funded front groups that are "community organizers," the field he knows best; "fascist" is used here in the sense of "corporativists" i.e. assigning sectors in society with different roles in service of the state:
Moreover, Sklar is concerned, as he writes, that Obama will make
“central to his presidency” what he calls “proto-statist structures
characteristic of fascist politics- that is, ‘social service’ political
organizations operating extra-electorally and also capable of electoral
engagement,” that will lead to “party-state systems…in which the party
is the state.” Thus, he notes that during the campaign, Obama favored
armed public service groups that could be used for homeland security,
that would tie leadership bureaucracies to him through the unions and
groups like ACORN.
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