What these guys are talking about is something else. They are talking about the security of the security services, their own self interests and the status quo of enmeshed relations between three letter agencies and a few captured tech giants.
On the contrary, the exact opposite is true. National security is best served by a diverse, pluralistic, open, heterogeneous tech industry. There is no reason intelligence needs cannot function properly with such an ecosystem, but it would have to do so through the Rule of Law, and systems of warrants that the incumbents have sought to bypass this last 20 years.
Large companies have massive resources which are a competitive advantage. Having these titanic companies headquartered in the US, beholden to American laws, employing Americans, being a symbol of American prowess abroad and listed on American stock exchanges is in American interests on multiple tangible & intangible levels; including allowing American engineers to command ridiculous salaries and granting the government a lot of soft-power.
The recent sanctions on Russia (and previously Huawei/ZTE) shows howuch that soft-power is worth
Yes, people and institutions, and technologies.
What gives security is something like "hybrid vigour" obtained by the whole system because it has evolutionary resilience (it's survivable, at least in part, to the greatest range of possible threats)
Parts of a resilient system can even be in moderate tension as they keep a check on each other.
For examples; it would be stronger to have both centralised and distributed philosophies represented; it would be good to have a mixture of public and private funding models in operation; small and large entities capable of agile innovation, and reliable scale.
That makes it hard for a malevolent or erroneous force to infiltrate and take out the whole barrel of apples.
Of course, diversity of gender, religion, race, age, political leaning and wealth tend to make a more interesting and vibrant workplace, but that's not primarily what I am saying.
Different viewpoints does not imply different backgrounds.
But not the wisdom.
1. Infiltration. An agent or asset could be in a position of power to enact desired policies and changes, provide a backdoor or whatever;
2. Jurisdiction. The platform falls under US jurisdiction so is subject to various forms of law enforcement, secret or otherwise. National Security Letters, FISA warrants, pen registers, that sort of thing; and
3. Propaganda. US companies reflect the cultural and political values of their founders, board and management as will as the will of stockholders. For some issues there is a political divide but for many issues there isn't, most notably when it comes to US foreign policy where Democrats and Republicans are basically indistinguishable.
The prevailing foreign policy view is that the US is good and a benign hegemony and a civilizing and democratizing force. The current foreign policy bent also favours interventionism and has since World War Two.
You see this at the huge backlash you get, even here among relatively educated and informed commenters, when you dare to suggest that the US bears some responsibility for Ukraine's predicament even though Russia is of course wholly responsible for an unjustifiable invasion.
It's a real lesson in the power of US propaganda and how ingrained the benign hegemony meme (and it is a meme) is.
My theory is the first 2 points I listed above don't matter. They're of almost no importance. What really matters is the ability of the US media (and I include social media companies in this umbrella) to project US propaganda and to normalize the US-centric view of the world.
Fundamentally, russia had no interest in allowing ukraine to be an independent country. US aid forestalled an invasion, and made the ultimate invasion a fairer fight, but it wasn't the cause of it.
No, it doesn't. This war has highlighted just how simplistic people are in that someone has to be the bad guy and someone has to be the good guy (hint: the US is always the good guy). Any suggestion that more than one party can bear responsibility or blame invites histrionics about victim-blaming.
The US friend zoned Ukraine, basically. The US knew it was never going to happen. Sure, Ukraine should figure that out (which they didn't seem to) but there's enough blame to go around.
But somehow you're excusing the lion.
No, that's just how it's sold to the public. E.g. I guarantee nobody had civilizing and democratizing in mind when the US occupying force in Iraq issued order 81:
the people in Iraq are now prohibited from saving newly designed seeds (not the traditional ones) and may only plant seeds for their food from licensed, authorized U.S. distributors. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Orders
Only 1 country is killing Ukrainians: Russia. There's no US troops massacring and raping Ukrainians... The only thing the US is responsible for is that they could have maybe threatened Russia enough to not invade.
Anyhow, I've been sceptical of US hegemony at times however one thing is clear: the world is far better with the US as the dominant power than it would be if Russia or China were dominant. At least the US allows its citizens and those of its 'protectorates' (or whatever you want to call US allies/countries it protects) a large degree of personal freedom.
People have a choice. Choose the US/Europe/Japan/South Korea/Taiwan, or, the mideast/Russia/China. Many people voted with their feet, migrating to the former nations. Those people have no room to speak as they already voted.
I'm missing some players of course, but generally speaking we in the Free World are definitely at a disadvantage and outnumbered by the hordes of people who desire strongmen and dictators. Most of the world actually does not want or trust themselves with self-determination through representative government. Russia is one of the few examples in Europe where the people want freedom, but don't really know what it is and are scared of the idea that they'll have to become active players in a non-farcical representative democracy.
The middle east similarly never asked for democracy. They largely see no use for it. Most of Asia is the same. The typical Chinese person prefers the greatness of China as a nationalistic power, rather than the greatness of their institutions progressing the freedom of mankind. Which is how most of us in Europe and North America view our true strengths as.
Of course, overt nationalism will lead to servitude, especially for Russia. They'll be losing Chechnya soon, and become a vassal state to China. Far lower than their previous state in the world. This is a nation that once slammed their foreheads on the ground in honor of their Turkish masters, now they are taking off their shoes for the Chinese. Their alternative choice was to ditch Putin, and join with the American, European and Asian democracies. Contrary to popular belief, we welcomed them. But Putin looks at old maps of the Russian Empire and honestly thought it was possible again. Being a farce democracy, there was no institutional resistance to stop him. He's only destroying Russia.
The Russian people are also ultimately responsible here. They chose to cower to Putin. I'm sympathetic to them to a degree, these are a people that haven't and don't dare to speak their views outside of their kitchen table. Yet inaction is an action. They can still stop this. But they have to storm the Kremlin and take him out ASAP. It won't happen. We have a newly confirmed genocidal state in the world to contend with.
Here's the thing, the people who keep saying that US bears responsibility for Ukraine's predicament are wrong. I'm Russian so I follow various sources (both Russian and Ukrainian) in the original languages. Putin has had his eyes on Ukraine at least since he came into power 20 years ago. In 2014 Igor Girkin (among others) was sent clandestinely to take over Crimea and start the war in the Donbas. Girkin is a monarchist and believes in "the Greater Russia". He believes that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people (an opinion Putin shares and has publicly proclaimed before the war).
The FSB has a whole department (the 5th service) devoted to subversion of Ukraine, including payment/bribes of billions of dollars to various gov't and media officials (one of whom, Viktor Medvedchuk, was captured by the SBU recently while attempting to flee house arrest).
Blaming this conflict on NATO and the US is part of Kremlin propaganda, including their "de-nazification" claims. If anything, this conflict has shown just how important NATO is in keeping people like Putin in check, as he would've gladly continued to the Baltic states and maybe others if his Ukrainian campaign succeeded (in fact, some Russian politicians have publicly stated this on national Russian TV recently).
As for Putin having eyes on Ukraine, let me argue it this way: NATO was never going to allow Ukraine to join. Germany, in particular, was always going to veto it. So even if you think that Putin had his eyes on Ukraine, NATO was never going to be a solution.
So what do you do? You get Ukraine to adopt a policy of neutrality similar to Finland, Sweden or Switzerland. You build your entire military around being a defensive army to make the cost of invasion so high as to dissuade anyone from trying. To be fair, Ukraine's military has exceeded all expectations here but the invasion was (IMHO) always doomed (at least for the entire country). It's simply too big and too populated. Russia simply can't maintain control of it.
Russia may well have invaded anyway but then we're in exactly the same situation we are now so what have we lost?
Its much more interesting i think because in the end, its a game of who remains in power, the public domain (government, theoretically) or the private domain (large Corp). The Chinese CP decived to crack down on to-big-to-fail, where as we in the west ...
A day later a bunch of former intelligence people basically said this is a good idea. That's funny to me.
Thanks, vouched even though I'm not sure your claim about "every major player" being out is correct (https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...). Still, easier to have that conversation elsewhere now that there's a general public conversation about it, so it's harder to hand-wave it away as conspiratorial.
Institutions like Blackrock or Vanguard don't get to vote, they may at most provide a proxy vote at cost.
The typical 'conspiracy' around those 2 is that their management can threaten entities like twitter with delisting. Twitter is then removed from their holdings at tremendous cost. So they have kind of a little threat and they get some say to do stuff like climate change and diversity stuff. Ultimately the orgs still take this upon themselves. It's an easy thing to bluff against.
Yes maybe some of these institutions have some players involved but I dont see it.
Twitter looks tremendously undefended.
It's ultimately a free speech issue. You can't demand people to self-censor because their previous employment places unjustified credibility their nonsensical views. The way to combat this is through better civic and media literacy.
Former intelligence people churn out all sorts of goofy takes because they're paid to, and after those goofy takes have been blasted by every corporate media outlet 24 hours a day for a month or two, they transform from goofy takes into orthodoxies that you could be fired for denying.
You're right but is this one a goofy take? Or is there a real something here?
You call it brand building, I call it destroying democracy.
The bigger point to discuss. If twitter is under control of the US government. I have no idea if it is or not, it just seems to be the case.
You dont get to make the comment 'twitter is private, free speech only applies to government' because twitter == government.
The other consideration I had. What if the us government doesnt explicitly own twitter. They simply dont realize the us government has hacked access to moderate and censor things in a clandestine way? Now it's an even more complicated subject but wouldn't justify the stock market situation that brings me to the point.
Vast amounts of ground, fortunately. How about the fact that we can have these conversations fully uncensored? That little thing known as freedom of speech, which is still overwhelmingly alive and well. I enjoy its use, aggressively, on a daily basis without persecution and have for decades uninterrupted.
how many people from Jan 6 have been charged with insurrection?
That hasn't been true for months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_States_Capitol_att...
Wiki used to call it insurrection but it's not that. I understand the criticism that perhaps it's because it's political, but that's the because the whole subject is political.
>It was certainly a dangerous mob driven by Trump and cronies intending to interfere with the US election proceedings without justifiable cause beyond pseudo-creedal feelings that somewhere, somehow, the election was stolen.
Dangerous seems an over reach.
Contemporary comparison you have mostly peaceful riots and actual insurrections like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Hill_Occupied_Protest
It's really important to see what's happening here. It's ultra important to be able to talk about these things.
Republicans need to address the police brutality and objectively proven racism.
Democrats need to address some things as well.
These conversations have to happen and they are going to hurt.
Trump lost, can nobody see that continuing to talk about him is counterproductive? On both sides!
Luckily, these people don't get a say in what congress does. I will continue to vote for legislators who advocate busting tech monopolies.
The set of people who vote on tech issues is dwarfed by the set of people who vote based on what "team" the candidate is on. That's simple reality, and it's not changing anytime soon.
If we want real change, we'll have to start paying the large "campaign contributions" that the organizations on the other side pay. It's a horrible thing to say, but that's how the system works.
I forgot how it was called. Something like "Safe Internet"?
The man who perjured himself in front of congress?
I think not.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/19/james-clap...
Stop saying this about journalists who you used to agree with, but now disagree with.
--
"Better to die on your feet than live on your knees."
~ Emiliano Zapata
--
"Live Free or Die"
~ U.S. state of New Hampshire
--
"Give me liberty or give me death!"
~ Patrick Henry
--
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
~ Benjamin Franklin
--
"True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else."
~ Clarence Darrow
~ Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. writing for a unanimous Supreme Court about why antiwar pamphleteers should be jailed.
--
"We think ... that [black people] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word "citizens" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time [of America's founding] considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them."
~ Chief justice Roger Taney, for the Supreme Court majority in Dred Scott vs. Sandford
The decision for the first quote you used was overturned afterward, over 50 years ago now. It's misrepresentative of the current state of the law and you shouldn't use it as an example.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-tim...
Let's hope the government maintains it's historical position of not resorting to tyranny and the country grows stronger as a result.
We already have a sizeable portion of the population that wants people that don't agree with them to be silenced. And as long as they can all still buy their cattle feed at Wal-Mart, nothing is going to change for the better.
I anticipate that self-hosters, linux users, and people who are not Facebooked will be further castigated as radicals and worse in the future.
Also note the irony that Substack contains Google and Amazon trackers.
Unfortunately, I've seen it cut the user more than the situation in my lifetime.
that is except if the US want's to become a fascist authoritarian state then yes it could be vital for that.
Imagine how different the world would be if China beat us to the internet and the Great Firewall was the world standard, but with AGI it will probably be able to rapidly become more advanced and prevent others from coming close to it.
If the US were to get serious in AI investment I wouldn't care about breaking up big tech but that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
That doesn't mean I approve of everything they do. That doesn't mean I can't or won't decry their putting thumbs on scales toward a certain type of bien-pensant ideology. That does mean that, overall, I am very, very glad that they are American instead of Russian, Chinese, or even British, French, or German.
Before Big Tech, we did not have such problems. This new narrative is pure self-serving propaganda, a figment of the imagination of corporate-funded lobbyists.
Free-market capitalism with freedom of speech is the recipe for economic prosperity. Has been for hundreds of years.
Some people will point to China as an attempt to show a counter-example ("Look at China, they're totalitarian and their economy has been booming.") but they conveniently forget the fact that China's growth has been happening during a time of general loosening of policies. The past 20 years in China have overall been characterized by an increasing tolerance for free-market capitalism and more freedom of speech compared to what it was before.
China came out of an extreme form of communism. Of course, any loosening would yield huge improvements! Also, they have over 1 billion people, of course any small improvement to even a small fraction of their population would have an impact globally.
The problem with the US and the west is not freedom of speech or the free market, it's our debt-based monetary system which is now based on soft money. The decline started in 1971 when USD became detached from the gold standard. It's no longer backed by anything; also, the growth in the currency supply has become unconstrained and the distribution mechanisms for all newly issued currency have been partially hijacked to serve corporate interests. The effects of this were not felt immediately. It's only in recent years that the negative effects of our soft-money system have become difficult to ignore.
The important thing to note is that no fiat system has ever survived more than a few hundred years. A monetary system which is founded on the endless debasement of its own currency is doomed to fail sooner or later. There has been hundreds of such monetary systems over thousands of years; not one which remains to this day. It has never worked and will never work in the long run. They're just pyramid schemes.
All companies just produce as many goods and services as they can using all the financing which is available to them. The biggest challenge in a supply side economy is finding customers to buy the goods which the company produced or plans to produce. It increases competition on the customer-acquisition side and reduces competition on the production side (I.e. quality goes down). It makes it almost impossible for small companies to compete.
The money printing acts as a kind of subsidy for big corporations (and regular citizens end up paying via inflation). Companies which are not subsidized cannot compete no matter how good their products are or how efficient they are at producing them. They can never get the same profit margins as big corporations due to the lack of subsidies. Subsidies from the money printer can come in the form of government grants, overly generous government contracts or from banks in the form of very low interest loans. It's an asymmetric playing field.
Those criticizing this and were called snobs and elitists; the market - the people - wanted soft news stories!
Interestingly the same ideological coterie that cheered news room gutting (because of a perceived ideological slant) and welcomed the soft news trend is now complaining about click-bait internet journalism.
You have it backwards. We didn't end Bretton Woods because the government wanted to print money. The government was printing money, so they had to end Bretton Woods or else hyperinflation would occur. Right after WWII, Europe and Japan were desperate for capital to rebuild, so they were willing to exchange physical gold with made up paper, so it was free money while it lasted. If there were any real interest in maintaining a fiscal responsibility, they would have allowed investors to buy gold at the same price.
When Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971, the fiat currencies of all countries around the world were still pegged to the USD. This aspect of the Bretton Woods agreement remained in place... The USD started losing value but this did not cause the USD to hyperinflate relative to other currencies because all countries were still trying to maintain a stable exchange rate relative to the USD. It became currency manipulation on a global scale. Economies became increasingly detached from real value.
You should watch 'Hidden Secrets of Money' - One of the episodes does a really good job at explaining how this occurred.
No one reporting that apparently.
I agree with some of your points but accusations like that without any room for nuance do not resonate with me.
> The problem with the US and the west is not freedom of speech or the free market, it's our debt-based monetary system which is now based on soft money.
And I've seen convincing arguments claiming the exact opposite: that debt has allowed large enterprises, investments that have gone on to create untold capital. I'm still on the fence.
> The decline started in 1971…
I have seen the "WTF Happened in 1971?" web site.
Just some things that the mainstream media lied about:
- The NIH having funded gain of function research in Wuhan Labs.
- The mortality rate of COVID19 (they ignored obvious issues with data collection and flawed incentives which over-counted deaths and under-counted cases).
- The effectiveness of COVID19 vaccines (several outlets initially said that 1 dose would be enough to get 90% protection, now they're saying we need 4).
- Covering up the 2008 and 2020 bailouts of the stock market - These are considered crimes in the eyes of many people but mainstream media has been silent on the subject.
- The existence of Hunter Biden's laptop containing compromising data.
You can look up all of these things. It's only a tiny fraction of all the lies they told.
I'm not trying to be snarky, I have a genuine interest in your perspective.
Economic prosperity for a handful of wealthy Brits you mean? Regulated capitalism created the middle class, free market capitalism is doing its damnedest to undo that outcome.
Why do corporations pay lobbyists? They wouldn't pay them if they weren't delivering returns for those corporations.
If for example you make a post that says "Vaccines cause autism". They dont have enough humans to moderate this. They write an algorithm that generally sees that and you get shadowbanned or equivalent.
What are all the subjects in which you may not talk about on twitter? Its not public knowledge. Open sourcing it means people can see the true bias.
It's been legally and scientifically established as outright misinformation. The genesis of that theory was a disgraced researcher who pushed fraudulent claims with misrepresented data. The paper was retracted for "scientific misconduct".
And yet now moderating false claims that have a detrimental effect on public health outcomes is seen as a "leftist government conspiracy".
This seems suspicious.
I could write an entire article about Tucker Carlson saying something and title it "Multi-millionaire frozen food heir says <something I don't like>"
I think the aggressiveness that the EU attacks big tech with is proof enough that the national security point is true.
> The cynical exploitation could hardly be more overt: if you hate Putin the way any loyal and patriotic American should, then you must devote yourself to full preservation of the power of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon.
Which golden goose has died or is going to? Tech profits are through the roof and have never been better, while growth continues unabated. The only thing big tech is facing are speeding fines and regional constraints on growth, which it can trivially afford (it has been a decade of the same talk while big tech has gotten massively bigger).
Operating income: Apple $117 billion, Microsoft $78b, Google $78b, Facebook $46b, Amazon $25b, Intel $22b, Cisco $14b, Oracle $11b, Qualcomm $11b, Nvidia $10b, Micron $10b, Broadcom $10b, Texas Instruments $9b, Applied Materials $8b, Adobe $6b, Netflix $6b
For reference ASML is at $7b and SAP is at $5b.
The US tech golden goose is going to get bigger and richer yet. It should only take you a few moments to estimate reasonably where eg Microsoft is going this decade (~$140+ billion in operating income, probably the size of all of Europe's tech companies op income combined in one company).
Greenwald takes that and elevates the claim to, "Any attempts to restrict Big Tech's monopolistic power would therefore undermine the U.S. fight against Moscow."
The letter makes no such claim. This amounts to a straw man.
Greenwald goes on to rail at the signees for the letter claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, but while the NYT recently apparently confirmed the genuine nature of Biden's laptop, that letter was still well-founded at the time. A thing can be genuine and have the hallmarks of developed disinformation.
I think Greenwald is being intellectually dishonest.
You should be explaining this claim rather than speculating about "hallmarks."
I don't think it would be unreasonable to speculate that they knew then what a portion of the general population knows now, namely that a vast disinformation network was disseminating information on behalf of Steve Bannon. This has been analyzed and reported on by social media analysis firm Graphika.
So combine an outlandish story of an abandoned laptop making its way to Rudy Giuliani with the outlandish and serially repeated claims of child pornography and push it out with a known disinformation network, and it has all the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign.
But that's just what I see that leads me to conclude that it's reasonable. Don't expect me to actually explain the intelligence community's behavior.
I suppose I'll also speak to the fact that someone from among the intelligence community vs. Trump's ilk deserves more of the benefit of the doubt. Given Trump and his ilk's long and trivially verifiable history of being brazen liars, I find it exceedingly easy to give the benefit of the doubt to the intelligence community.
They had zero proof it was Russian disinformation.
They just made that up despite indications the laptop was in fact authentic.
And they did that right before a Presidential election.
That doesn’t concern you? You feel that the letter was “well founded”? Founded on what? A politically convenient guess?
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/04/hunter-biden-la...
Perhaps the most concerning thing is that a group of such blatantly unscrupulous people has actual political support in the US.
I feel the need to draw a parallel to Trump's refusal of military aid to Ukraine contingent upon them manufacturing an investigation of Hunter Biden, over which he was impeached.
So on the one hand you have the country of freedom that must preserve its monopolistic structures and accept the lesser evil to fight the enemies abroad but the communist security state is busy... reigning their giants in?
Probably a good time to quote Sheldon Wolin who thought of the American system as 'inverted totalitarian'
"Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash"
Somehow, I think that the CPC knows that the Chinese internet companies won't run without Alibaba, but I also think they know a lot of the Chinese engineers who work for Alibaba don't really have too many other places to go. So important players like Alibaba will probably stand regardless of the level of crackdowns they have taken. For the sake of competitiveness – and to keep Jack Ma erstwhiles in line – some random flogging may be in order. I think China is also concerned about the brain drain caused by having a tech sector that's too economically prosperous compared to the rest of the economy. (How they acted on that is another thing).
The U.S., meanwhile, evidently doesn't care very much about the long-term health of its tech economy.
I'm really uncomfortable about the situation that this presents. In the U.S., Apple has usually pushed against the establishment making it easier to crack their phones. And there are worse social networks than FB and Twitter. There are better ones too, but if I find myself wanting to defend Apple against the government (even though I'm sure they're taking their stance out of selfish reasons), then the overall situation seems like it is inherently balanced against U.S. competitiveness in tech.
