Bill To Punish Social Media Companies For Addictive Features For Minor Users Killed in Senate

‘Social media companies had so much to lose from this bill’

A bipartisan bill that would punish social media companies for having addictive and harmful features for users under the age of 18 was was killed in the Senate on Thursday, ending hopes this year for social media addiction legislation in California.

Assembly Bill 2408, authored by Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham (R-Paso Robles) and Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks (D-Oakland), proposed to hold social media companies responsible for addicting children under the age of 18 to their services and would impose a duty not to addict as well as prohibit the use and sale of a child’s personal data. The bill, also known as the Social Media Platform Duty to Children Act, would allow the legal guardian of the child who suffers injury due to the addiction to sue the companies, which includes a civil penalty of up to $250,000 per violation.

AB 2408 would cover all social media features created before January 2023. Only social media companies that make $100 million or more in gross revenue in the past year would be covered by the bill. Streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, or Disney+ would not be covered, with the same exemption ruling out companies that only offer e-mailing or texting services, as well as services whose primary functions allow users to play video games, due to their everyday and emergency uses.

If it passed, companies would either have had until April of next year to remove the features addictive to those under 18, or conduct regular audits to find any parts of their service being addictive and taking action to not be held liable.

While both Assemblymembers wrote the bill due to studies showing the rise of social media addiction in teensrecent social media company whistleblowers coming forward with information showing how addictive it can be, and growing concern among parental and advocacy groups that social media is growing less safe for kids, social media companies lobbied hard against the bill.

Most notably, Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), Twitter, Snap (which owns Snapchat), and TikTok spent millions in their individual lobbies due to the potential of losing millions more as well as losing users under the age of 18.

“Social media companies had so much to lose from this bill,” explained Sharon Ireland, a social media consultant, to the Globe on Thursday. “They all agree that addiction is an important issue to tackle, but they also didn’t want to be chopped off at the knees because of it.”

AB 2408 killed in Senate

In May, Assemblyman Cunningham explained that the bill was about protecting kids as no national action or action by the companies themselves had been implemented yet.

“The era of unfettered social experimentation on children is over and we will protect kids,” said Assemblyman Cunningham. “The issue that we’re trying to address is there’s really no incentive for these social media companies to do anything different than what they’ve been doing. D.C. isn’t taking action on this. There’s bipartisan agreement that something needs to happen. But guess what’s coming out of Washington? Nothing. California can lead the way here.”

AB 2408 had an unusual voting record since being introduced this year. While it passed the Assembly and made it through one Senate committee, Republicans and Democrats were with each other on both sides, either voting to pass the bill or not voting on the measure rather than say no. Republicans in favor of social media companies as well as Democrats from the Bay area largely split from those in favor of those taking the more hardline stance of protecting kids online.

Earlier this month the bill was placed on the suspense file. On Thursday, a quick vote killed the bill, ending the effort for at least the rest of the year.

While social media companies celebrated, Cunningham noted that kids would still be harmed in the meantime and said that voters would have likely supported the bill if it was up to them.

“I am extremely disappointed,” said Cunningham. “The bill’s death means a handful of social media companies will be able to continue their experiment on millions of California kids, causing generational harm.”

“This idea would be overwhelmingly supported if presented directly to the voters, as it would be prohibitively expensive for social media companies to take every California voter on a Tech Caucus junket in Napa.”

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe

Facebook, Instagram Posts Flagged as False for Rejecting Biden’s Recession Wordplay

Meta’s third-party fact-checkers have flagged as “false information” posts on Instagram and Facebook accusing the Biden administration of changing the definition of a recession in order to deny that the U.S. economy has entered one. This is yet another reminder that the project of purportedly independent fact-checking on social media is a highly partisan one, in which legitimately debatable opinions are passed off as objective truth.

Last week, the White House published an online article disputing the standard definition of an economic recession: i.e., two consecutive fiscal quarters in which GDP growth was negative.

“Both official determinations of recessions and economists’ assessment of economic activity are based on a holistic look at the data—including the labor market, consumer and business spending, industrial production, and incomes,” wrote the White House. “Based on these data, it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.”

This post has been widely shared—and in some cases, mocked—on social media. Graham Allen, an Instagram personality, posted a video reacting to the post in which he asked Siri to define the term recession. Siri’s definition: two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth.

But Allen’s video is currently obscured on Instagram; users can still watch it, but they first have to click past a disclaimer that it contains “false information reviewed by independent fact-checkers.” A similar label has appeared on some Facebook posts that also take issue with the Biden administration’s wordplay.

The fact-checker is Politifact, a fact-checking website run by the Poynter Institute. Politifact is an official third-party fact-checking apparatus for Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram. This means that PolitiFact is not like any ordinary website that offers a critique of a political narrative: PolitiFact’s critiques are enforced by social media platforms.

In this instance, PolitiFact has rated as false the claim that “the White House is now trying to protect Joe Biden by changing the definition of the word recession.” PolitiFact acknowledges that the Biden administration’s efforts to spin current economic conditions as something other than a recession are political in nature. Nevertheless, the fact-checkers conclude that since the White House is citing the National Bureau of Economic Research’s official definition, the administration is on solid footing.

Phil Magness, director of research and education at the American Institute for Economic Research, thinks PolitiFact is playing games.

“In this case, PolitiFact’s ‘ruling’ is compounded by the fact that they have previously invoked the very same definition of a recession—2 consecutive quarters of GDP decline— in previous rulings to either provide cover to exaggerated Democratic claims about an impending recession or tear down Republican claims to the same effect,” he tells Reason.

In a recent op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Magness explained that the NBER is not the “official arbiter of recessions”; on the contrary, the federal government has often used the general definition preferred by most lay people, as well as Siri:

Mr. Biden’s economic advisers are certainly free to make the case for a revised determination. The NBER takes a more holistic approach, in part because some recessionary events are shorter than two quarters or manifest in nonconsecutive quarters. But this rationale works against the White House’s current argument, which seeks to delay acknowledging a recession even if a two-quarter decline is observed this year. The NBER committee has previously acknowledged recessions that fell short of a strict and sustained two-quarter contraction. This last happened during the 2000 dot-com bust, which played out in nonconsecutive quarterly drops.

While recognizing its limitations, the traditional definition of a recession provides a functional rule of thumb to interpret events as they unfold. The NBER determination is a rigorous and reputable historical indicator for dating the beginning and end of business-cycle troughs, but it isn’t suitable for real-time policy determinations.

This is hardly the first time that the social media fact-checking industry has failed to add clarity to a contentious issue. Last year, PolitiFact rated as false the claim that COVID-19 is 99 percent survivable for most age groups.

“Experts say a person cannot determine their own chances at surviving COVID-19 by looking at national statistics, because the data doesn’t take into account the person’s own risks and COVID-19 deaths are believed to be undercounted,” wrote PolitiFact.

Regardless of what “experts say,” it is certainly the case that individual persons can estimate their likelihood of surviving COVD-19 based on national statistics. The disease’s age discrimination is extreme: The overwhelming majority of young, healthy people are not at significant risk, especially when compared with elderly Americans. This was a curious fact-check, and it was hardly the first.

Science Feedback, another of Meta’s fact-checking partners, wrongly labeled as false one of my own articles about the efficacy of mask mandates in schools. Not only was the fact-check incorrect, but it also introduced a new error: The fact-checker suggested that my article had erroneously claimed masks don’t work to stop the spread of COVID-19 in schools. In actuality, my article had only asserted that there wasn’t much compelling evidence that mask mandates had made a difference. (A year later, this distinction is moot, since even COVID-cautious public health officials now admit the cloth masks required in most schools do practically nothing to thwart the variants.) After I pointed out the mistake to Facebook, Science Feedback removed the “false information” label.

Click here to read the full article at Reason.com

Government Regulation of Social Media Won’t Protect Free Speech

Sen. Amy Klobuchar wants to put HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, the former California attorney general with a reputation for being a partisan hack, in charge of “health disinformation” online.

Is it me or does the Facebook whistleblower’s “bombshell” revelations seem like much ado about very little? The company’s former product manager, Frances Haugen, has given the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal thousands of internal documents that say more about the state of American culture than they do about the social-media company.

“No one at Facebook is malevolent, but the incentives are misaligned, right?” Haugen told CBS News. “Like, Facebook makes more money when you consume more content. People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction. And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume.”

If that’s the issue, then one can just as easily blame newspapers, TV news shows, talk radio, and political parties—all of which benefit by stirring the pot. For some reason, people prefer conflict to happy thoughts about puppies (although there are plenty of those posted on Facebook). Do we blame the medium or the human condition?

Haugen shared an internal Facebook survey showing that Instagram increases thoughts of suicide and worsens eating disorders among teens. I would never minimize the tribulations of being a teenager, but Haugen seems woefully naive. Young girls have always compared themselves to the photos of fashion models in magazines. Teens were vicious to one another long before Instagram.

Again, do we blame social media or something deeper? The same goes for commenters who post incendiary information on their Facebook pages. These are platforms, which people use for good or ill. This nonsense reminds me of liberal politicians who blame video games for gun violence and conservative politicians who blame Hollywood movies for an erosion of the nation’s morals.

It’s time to grow up. The problem with the latest hysteria: A rash of new rules and regulations will certainly follow. As The Wall Street Journal noted, Haugen’s testimony before Congress “builds momentum for tougher tech laws.” Of course it does, and conservatives—who will be on the receiving end of whatever passes—will only have themselves to blame.

“(T)he time is ripe for the regime and the digital medium to face a long-overdue just comeuppance,” wrote Josh Hammer in The American Mind, in a typical conservative diatribe against tech firms. Hammer calls for Congress to “rein in the ‘Mountain View-Menlo Park nexus of woke leftist corporatism…lest technocracy vanquish democracy anew.'”

Click here to read the rest of the article on Reason.com

How Big Tech Will Swing the 2018 Elections, Then Take Over the World

FacebookFacebook is a menace to grassroots political organizing — and to free and fair elections generally. The social media giant this week announced it would ban “misinformation” about the upcoming midterm elections. According to a Reuters story about the new policy, “Facebook Inc. will ban false information about voting requirements and fact-check fake reports of violence or long lines at polling stations ahead of next month’s U.S. midterm elections, . . . the latest effort to reduce voter manipulation on its service.”

But not to worry: “The world’s largest online social network, with 1.5 billion daily users, has stopped short of banning all false or misleading posts, something that Facebook has shied away from as it would likely increase its expenses and leave it open to charges of censorship.”

Don’t believe it. Facebook is already in the censorship business.

In an article published last month titled, “How Facebook Policy Hinders Political Speech,” Ruth Papazian explained in excruciating detail just how difficult it has become to place political ads on Facebook. What this monopolistic communications behemoth has done to the abilities of grassroots groups to spread their messages far and wide cannot be understated.

Facebook selectively has disabled the most effective means of grassroots organizing ever devised. The timing of the move, a few months before one of the most pivotal midterm elections in American history, denies every small neighborhood group and individual activist the capacity to quickly tailor the content of their ads to local voters.

Large, lavishly funded, well-established campaigns, however, are relatively unaffected by Facebook’s new policy. They have the money, connections, and expertise to treat this new policy as a speedbump. And, of course, it isn’t just Facebook.

With growing assertiveness, an assortment of mega-corporations that, for all practical purposes, control virtually all online communications in America, some of them the largest companies on earth, are making a concerted effort to influence the 2018 elections. And their ambitions reach far beyond this November.

These corporations have left-leaning employees and left-leaning top management. They wield an ability not only to suppress viewpoints with which they don’t agree and promote viewpoints with which they do agree, but they can also use search results and proprietary search content to shape behaviors and values dramatically.

Big Tech Is Rewriting History

To present an embarrassingly obvious example of how Big Tech is rewriting history, take a look at the result that comes up on Google if you search under the term “American Inventors.” You will see portrait images of fifty individuals who are, according to Google, the top inventors in American history. There are 21 black men, 11 black women, and 18 white men. Curiously, no white women are included on the list.

This blatant distortion of historical reality matters more than might readily be apparent. First, it is part of a pervasive pattern whereby the left-wingers who control high-tech companies are rewriting history. But it is more pernicious in its consequences than just that. How will a 10-year-old African-American view his role in society, if he believes that two out of three of the most significant American inventions came from the minds of brilliant African Americans but that these contributions deliberately have been neglected? Won’t that be evidence to support the leftist assertion that racism, and only racism, account for lack of prominent mention for blacks in American history?

If this were an isolated example, it would not matter. But it is emblematic of how Big Tech is controlling not only who can communicate and what we can see, but how we view ourselves, our society, and our origins.

The Biggest Companies in the World
When we say “Big Tech,” that’s no exaggeration. The table below presents the financial power of some of the primary players controlling how we learn and communicate.

The data on this table makes obvious that behind the monopolies or near monopolies these companies wield in data search, social networks, videos, online retail including books, movies, and music, smartphones, and web browsers, there is almost unimaginable financial power. These seven companies together are sitting on $385 billion in cash. Think about this. The smallest of the seven, Twitter, has nearly $4 billion sitting in its checking account.

The pieces are in place for these companies, if not literally to take over the world, then at least to play a crucial role, if not the crucial role, in shaping what kind of world we leave to the next generation. For all practical purposes, they have monopolistic control over how we learn and communicate. And they have more discretionary cash than any other private interest, anywhere. The tools of influence they wield are only beginning to be developed.

To explore the dystopian potential of these dawning technologies, you don’t have to rely on conservative analysts. Arguments aplenty can be found in the liberal media; you would think they’d connect the dots and recognize what could happen if and when Big Tech is no longer controlled by liberals.

Writing for The Atlantic, Yuval Noah Harari suggests “perhaps in the 21st century, populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.” He suggests that the AI revolution may transfer the relative efficiency of a nation’s political economy from one currently favoring democracies to one favoring dictatorships. He argues that the power of massively connected networks, incorporated into everything we use and present everywhere we go, controlled by powerful AI systems, flips the equation, explaining that “the main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century—the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place—may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.”

Elaborating on this point in his recent article published by The Guardian, “The Myth of Freedom,” Harari describes human beings as “hackable.” He writes, “propaganda and manipulation are nothing new. But whereas in the past they worked like carpet bombing, now they are becoming precision-guided munitions. When Hitler gave a speech on the radio, he aimed at the lowest common denominator, because he couldn’t tailor his message to the unique weaknesses of individual brains. Now it has become possible to do exactly that.”

Think about it. Your Fitbit, always connected, monitors how you react as you click on various links online. This means that not only your clicks but your simultaneous physical reaction to what you are seeing are monitored and compiled. Eventually, the machines know you better than you know yourself. Your brain has been hacked. Dr. Pavlov, meet Brave New World.

Even the hyper-liberal New Yorker has alluded to how technology enables totalitarian regimes, in the closing paragraphs of a September 2018 article, “What Termites Can Teach Us.” Writer Amia Srinivasan refers to the “RoboBee,” “a mechanical bee, smaller than a paper clip, that can take off, fly, and land.” She cites a paper published by the Center for a New American Security, “Robotics on the Battlefield Part II: The Coming Swarm,” which holds up the RoboBee as evidence of the possibility of 3-D-printed, less-than-a-dollar-apiece drones that, in vast quantities, “could ‘flood’ civilian and combat areas as ‘smart clouds.’”

Patriots, you may or may not have reason to be paranoid, but in any case, don’t rely on your AR-15s to preserve your liberty. Start a hacker collective. The “smart cloud” is coming. You can’t shoot down a swarm of bees. Then again, you may not care.

Big Tech Is Redrawing International Maps
Consider the map feature on Google. The planet’s nations and cities include bitterly disputed borders and place names. But even physical features require subjective decisions. Shall higher altitudes be depicted in summer or winter? A summer image might feed the imagination of anyone inclined to believe the “planet has a fever.”

Call up Google’s “satellite view” of the vast savannas of Africa or the steppes of Asia—are they summer brown or spring green? A vastly differing impression is created. And how green is the green? Are the watered areas of earth verdant and lustrous with life, or tepidly broaching a bit of tentative foliage wilting on a warming world? What about snowpacks and glaciers? What view? Winter or summer?

When it comes to political geography, Google is an international actor with enormous influence. It’s a tough job, drawing borders on a map when everyone on earth uses your map.

According to Google, the city of Srinagar is no longer part of Indian Kashmir. Instead, it’s in a region with dotted borders indicating uncertain sovereignty. Similarly, the entire northeastern portion of Kashmir is lopped off, with dotted lines again, indicating that this area may actually be part of China. A province in the extreme northeast of India, Arunachal Pradesh, now has a dotted line drawn through its middle, questioning whether the northern half of that province belongs to India or to China. Ditto for the eastern border of Tajikistan, where Google’s dotted line asserts that nobody knows where Tajikistan ends and China begins. But among Google’s mapmakers, who decides? Where’s Tibet? Why no dotted line to delineate that occupied land?

While Google ignores Tibetan claims to nationhood, they recognize every indigenous tribe in North America. Observe the United States. When the lower 48 fills about half your screen, you’ll see the names of each state. Zoom in one notch. Suddenly the Navajo, Blackfeet, Crow, Yakima, Cheyenne and dozens of other tribes all have nations—reservations with borders and place names written in faint but capitalized fonts larger than those used for names of major cities. Same thing for Canada and South America.

Even if Google’s mapmakers didn’t have an agenda, millions of people would disagree with their choices. But billions more would accept the lines they draw, solid and dotted alike, as truth. The manner in which Google arbitrates international borders constitutes real power. Google controls 92 percent of the global mapping and GIS market. The company also controls more than 90 percent of the global internet searchmarket, and through YouTube, it controls 79 percent of multimedia websites and video portals worldwide. And Google has more than $100 billion in its checking account.

Big Tech Is Reprogramming Americans En Masse

That the founders and the employees of big tech companies are overwhelmingly Democrats should by now be beyond serious debate. And evidence mounts that these biases inform how they write their algorithms. There’s nothing objective about an algorithm—it may process every query with complete impartiality, but built into the logic and lookup tables are the preferences and priorities of a human being.

One widely reported study claims that biased search results can influence elections in close races. The study, authored in 2015 by Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson and published in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences, reached four conclusions regarding search engines and search engine manipulation: First, they identify a positive feedback loop, whereby when search rankings affect voter preferences, those voters then search on terms that are, for example, favorable towards a particular candidate. This results in those favorable search results receiving more clicks which in-turn causes them to be ranked higher still, generating more views and clicks, and so on.

Second, search engine manipulation is very hard to detect, leading those influenced by it to believe they have formed their new opinions voluntarily.

Third, unlike explicit campaigning, where candidates have equal access to conventional means of voter outreach, search engine manipulation occurs at the discretion of the company that owns the search engine, leaving out-of-favor candidates with no means to counter its effects.

Fourth, conventional means of voter outreach continue to lose effectiveness relative to the impact of online resources such as search engines.

The elephant in the room here is Google, and even if that company isn’t directing its programmers to introduce liberal bias into their search results, the culture within Google suggests their programmers would be doing it anyway.

After all, this is the company that fired James Damore for circulating an internal memo that committed the heresy of arguing that disparities in group achievement might be due to something other than racism and sexism. This is the company where, in a leaked email, their former head of “multicultural marketing” described efforts she led on behalf of the company to increase Latino turnout in the 2016 election and bemoaned the fact that not enough of them voted for Democrats. This is the company where 90 percent of reported political donations by executives and employees went to Democrats in the period between 2004 and 2016; over $15 million.

And it isn’t just Google, of course. Twitter “shadowbans.” Facebook suppresses conservative commentators. YouTube restricts conservative videos. Apple bans “controversial” programs from its App Store. Can Amazon and other eBook purveyors even rewrite classic literature? Well, why not? The tactics these companies employ are difficult to detect and nearly impossible to counter.

Increasingly, this handful of mega-corporations have the power to rewrite history, to determine who is permitted to have a public voice, and to decide what is a fact and what is not a fact. And it extends to nearly every facet of life, not just election manipulation, but the foundations of Western Civilization; culture, race, gender, patriarchy, nationalism, patriotism, meritocracy, underachievement, even the reasons for climate change.

As Big Tech arbitrates the premises of reality, facts, according to their own beliefs and biases, a complicit media follows suit. For example, the BBC recently updated their guidelines for future reporting on climate change issues. Suddenly certain conclusions are no longer heard. But facts are based on data. And data can often be analyzed and interpreted, with integrity, to yield diametrically opposed conclusions. “Facts” are often opinions. This skepticism used to be the lifeblood of both science and journalism, but skepticism is only selectively encouraged anymore. Big Tech is narrowing that range when it ought to be expanding it.

Pessimists frequently refer to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 as representative of where we’re headed. But more likely we are being herded into a future more reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. That novel, written in 1931, is astonishingly prescient. In his forward to the 1946 edition of Brave New World, Huxley writes: “There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianism should resemble the old. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

Stare into the glass. The mesmerizing blue light. Click. Click again. Let the dopamine flow.

Facebook Employees in Uproar over Executive Who Backs Brett Kavanaugh

Mark ZuckerbergFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has come under fire recently due to a top Facebook global policy executive’s decision to support Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and appear at his hearing. One prominent executive claims Facebook is an “apolitical” company.

According to the Wall Street Journal, hundreds of employees at the social media firm Facebook have expressed their anger about top global policy executive, Joel Kaplan’s decision to support Brett Kavanaugh at his upcoming hearing. Employees questioned CEO Mark Zuckerberg directly about the Kavanaugh-supporting executive in a weekly question-and-answer session held last Friday, Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg — a vocal Hillary Clinton supporter — also apparently weighed in on the issue.

An internal discussion thread was reportedly filled with hundreds of comments. Many Facebook employees were critical of the executive’s decision to support Kavanaugh. The topic became an issue after a photo of Facebook’s Head of Global Policy Joel Kaplan appeared to show the executive present at Kavanaugh’s hearing last Thursday. This resulted in an internal discussion about how Facebook’s executives felt about the #MeToo movement, freedom of speech, and President Trump.

Zuckerberg was relatively non-committal in his response to the employee’s issues, stating that he wouldn’t have made the same decision as Kaplan, but that his presence at the hearing did not violate any of Facebook’s company policies and that Zuckerberg was aware that Kaplan and Kavanaugh had been longtime friends. This, however, did not satisfy employees and the internal debate still continued with Zuckerberg and Sandberg planning to address the employees issues at a town hall meeting on Friday.

One employee stated: “This fire has been burning for a full week now.” Kaplan reportedly appeared defensive in his initial response, stating that he took the day off, but the executive’s tone shifted as further controversy over his appearance arose. Many were angered over Kaplan’s appearance at the hearing as since the 2016 election, Facebook has discouraged employees from expressing their political opinions publicly, but now the company’s head of global policy was appearing at a hearing that had become extremely politicized over recent weeks. …

Click here to read the full article from Breitbart.com/California

Silicon Valley’s Political Perils

FacebookLast week’s news underscored growing concerns over the politicization of tech companies. With his inimitable style, President Trump claimed on Twitter that Google shows political bias by skewing the news found in online searches. Relatedly, a group of some 100 conservative-leaning Facebook employees formed an online community to escape the strictures of a “political monoculture” and provide themselves a “safe” place for “ideological diversity” among their 25,000 co-workers.

It’s a truism that Silicon Valley leans left, but the average tech millionaire is not easy to pigeonhole ideologically. A revealing, if little-noted, 2017 study from Stanford University compared more than 600 “elite technology company leaders and founders,” 80 percent of them millionaires, with more than “1,100 elite partisan donors” of both political persuasions. The distinctions are revelatory for anyone interested in mapping the future of American politics. “Increasingly, technology entrepreneurs are using their personal wealth and firms’ power to exercise political influence,” the survey’s authors observe. “For example, recent federal candidates have referred to Silicon Valley as a ‘political ATM’.” The study found that 80 percent of tech millionaires overwhelmingly donate to Democrats over Republicans; hardly a surprising finding.

But the key reveal of the Stanford analysis is not about party alignment in donations: it’s in what can only be called a kind of political schizophrenia around the core ideologies associated with each party. On one hand, the study showed that Silicon Valley’s titans are firmly aligned with Democrats on social issues, what the survey calls “liberal redistributive, social, and globalistic policies.”  But on the other hand, the survey shows that the ideologies—if not the financial support—of tech millionaires solidly align with Republicans on issues relating to the regulatory environment, specifically around such topics as drones, data storage, self-driving cars, and employee policies.

This ideological rift prompted the Stanford researchers to conclude that tech’s business elites are donating politically against their “self-interest.” For analysts and political operatives, the question is whether that’s an immutable or malleable political reality. After all, it’s not just Republicans like President Trump attacking Silicon Valley; Senator Bernie Sanders, the standard-bearer of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, is one of many in that caucus taking on the tech giants on “fairness” issues surrounding income inequality in general and Amazon CEO’s Jeff Bezos’s uber-wealth in particular.

It’s risky for companies to become identified with a specific political orientation. The recent evidence of a political tilt at numerous Silicon Valley firms—or at least among their leaders—has ignited controversy, not just in Washington but also in the tech community itself. At least one Valley executive worries that “political correctness” could hurt innovation, the mother’s milk of the tech sector. Google’s firing of engineer James Damore for raising questions about gender differences on an internal discussion board showed the willingness of tech companies to police political expression.

There is a real existential risk for tech companies to be found in the historical propensity of governments to declare new tech enterprises, especially new means of communication, as inherently monopolistic—and thus inherently unfair. Back in 1949, on the theory that radio broadcast companies had monopolistic control of that medium, Congress ordered broadcasters to “afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views of public importance.” The Fairness Doctrine would survive for nearly four decades, before it was revoked in 1987.

Some Democrats sought to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine a decade or so ago, in response to the rise of talk radio, which became overwhelmingly conservative after 1987. Now, some Republicans (and Democrats, too) are looking again at the notion of “fairness” in the context of the dominant market share enjoyed by the likes of Facebook or Google. Google’s global share of “search” has reached 90percent, and Senator Orrin Hatch has already sent a letter to the FTC to request an investigation of anti-competitive practices at the company.

When it comes to issues surrounding access to accurate and “fair” news and information in particular, the challenging question is whether anyone can easily see if there is (or isn’t) an algorithmic finger on the scale of fairness. In the history of the news business, this is an unprecedented concern. The designers and coders of the algorithms respond that the Web’s interstices are arcane and not easy for the layman to understand. In effect, the experts are saying: it’s complicated, so trust us. From a technical perspective, it would indeed be difficult to come up with a “user interface” that provided credible transparency about how news and information are curated or accessed on Web platforms. But one could have said the same thing, circa 1990, about converting the Arpanet’s technically arcane TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) into a Web system so simple that preschool children can use it now.

As Steve Jobs famously said two decades ago, “simple can be harder than complex.” But conquering complexity used to be what animated Silicon Valley. That is, in fact, how Google got started. It’s time to revive that zeitgeist, and make the power of news on the Internet not just easy to use, but easy to trust.

Silicon Valley Doesn’t Know Best

FacebookSilicon Valley has had a rough year. For the first time since the start of the social media revolution, the American public has begun to question the tech sector’s integrity and intentions. Many brand-name Internet-based companies have worked hard over the years to obscure the true nature of their business models, which typically involve harvesting and selling user data to advertisers. Google, Apple, Facebook, and others have tried to insulate themselves from criticism by cultivating a benign image as post-partisan problem-solvers and pure-hearted community builders. In the first half of 2018, however, giant cracks began to appear in this carefully constructed façade. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was hauled before Congress in April to explain his $500 billion company’s apparently lax attitude toward data privacy. Now the company’s stock price is tumbling, due in part to investor concerns over the run of bad publicity. Silicon Valley realizes the magnitude of the crisis at hand. Tech-industry executives have spent the last six months scrambling to assure users that their data are safe and that the bond of trust between the public and the new engine of American economic growth and innovation should never be broken.

It’s a tough sell. The game all along has been to distract us with shiny electronic toys while converting our most personal information into cold cash (or, lately, cryptocurrency). The mountains of money being made off our browsing habits and purchasing history go to funding ever-more extravagant and utopian projects that, by their very nature, would corrode the foundations of free society, leaving us practically enslaved to an elite coterie of tech geniuses.

The vision of the future that Silicon Valley has in mind is not the one you probably imagined for yourself when you were a teenager, unless you grew up with a dream of living out your adult years on the Starship Enterprise. In fact, the self-sustaining, self-explaining world of Star Trek makes a good analogy for the tech future that the Silicon Valley overlords envision. On the Enterprise, a handful of superbly qualified specialists assigned themselves the lion’s share of responsibility for running the ship, carrying out the “prime directive,” and boldly going where no man had gone before. To viewers, the Enterprise seemed like a large vessel, but almost everyone apart from the show’s stars existed out of sight. You didn’t see much of them unless they became a necessary (and usually disposable) plot device. What was everyone else on the ship doing while Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Bones, Scotty, Chekov, Sulu, and Uhura were getting into and out of interstellar scrapes? No one knows for sure, but they functioned as a kind of disposable service class, rarely noticed by the officers on the bridge.

Futurists and sci-fi fans drooled over the Enterprise’s omniscient, disembodied voice known as “computer” that could be called on at any time to answer questions. It wasn’t just an eerily prescient version of the new breed of countertop digital assistants, like the Amazon Echo and Google Home. It was also artificial intelligence with the capability of doing complex, sometimes abstract, computation on the fly. It could engage in hypotheticals and had a physical dimension as well. It was not just the ship’s brain; it was the ship itself.

In its conception and presentation, the Enterprise’s computer was close to what WIRED magazine founder Kevin Kelly has called “the technium”—a discreet “superorganism of computation.” In books and interviews, Kelly has described the emergence of a global cloud, a computer of computers. The technium is a summa of the world’s computing power: all its desktops, laptops, mainframes, servers, cell phones, tablets, and land lines rolled into one. Throw in the cars and the ovens and the baby monitors and the wireless printers from the Internet of Things, too. Sometimes Kelly calls it the One Machine, the sum total of all the hardware and software working, humming, and resonating in an ever-closer harmony of artificial intelligence. “It has its own force that it exerts,” Kelly has said. “That force is part cultural (influenced by and influencing of humans), but it’s also partly non-human, partly indigenous to the physics of technology itself. That’s the part that is scary and interesting.”

The scary parts are easy to see.

The visionaries of Silicon Valley seem, at best, ambivalent about the social implications of calling into existence an omniscient, self-aware technium; at worst, they are so eager to see it happen that they can barely contain themselves. Call it delusions of grandeur, the God complex, or plain-old ordinary lust for power, but the celebrated geniuses of tech seem to have one thing in common: they think that they know better than the rest of us how society should run. They envision a pyramid-shaped political economy, with themselves and the super-productive Silicon Valley workforce at the top and the rest of us spanning out below in a massive, obedient—and grateful—base. The bad news is that they have the means to try to make this happen, and the implicit support of many of the soon-to-be governed, which derives from more than a decade of supplying everyone with things that we didn’t know we wanted until we got them.

The “techdaddies”—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin—just know that the fulfillment of the technium’s promise will be great for everyone. But it will benefit them most of all, because it will give them—and their smart, talented, productive ilk—a place of undeniable privilege at the top of the pyramid. Why shouldn’t it be thus? They’ve already proved their worth.

The tech visionaries also know that far-out ideas sometimes become reality. In the Think Different world of Silicon Valley, this has translated into an attitude of “the whackier, the better”—if you can dream it, it can be done; if it can be done, it should be done. “Make it so,” in the words of Kirk’s successor as captain of the Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard, is the order of the day.

The list of Google’s extravagant ideas is too long to print here, but they range from the achievable—scanning every book ever published—to the far-fetched—a “space elevator” connected to an orbiting satellite. In the near future, expect Google to offer you the computing power and Internet connectivity of a smartphone in the form of a contact lens or the windshield of a self-driving car. Captains Kirk and Picard would be envious. Google’s futurists have also bandied about impossible dreams that they call “moonshots”—wildest-imagination stuff, such as mining asteroids for rare minerals. In 2013, Google launched the California Life Company, or Calico, a mysterious “longevity lab” with a goal to extend human lifespans. The venture prompted Time to ask, “Can Google Solve Death?”

Among Mark Zuckerberg’s big dreams is to engineer a way for us to send our innermost thoughts directly to one another via instant-message telepathy. Call it thought mail. “One day, I believe we’ll be able to send full, rich thoughts to each other directly using technology,” he said during a 2015 question-and-answer session. “You’ll just be able to think of something and your friends will immediately be able to experience it, too, if you’d like.” This idea is no doubt borne of a charitable impulse to assist those who cannot speak for one reason or another, or to eliminate the problem of texting while driving, but it is patently ridiculous. I can think of few things that I would desire less than having other people’s thoughts—complete with emojis and a soundtrack?—beamed into my head. The plan has pitfalls for sender and receiver alike. As Nicholas Carr quips, “That’s really going to require some incredible impulse control.” Then again, maybe it won’t, since many of us have already given up on being able to control ourselves around technology.

And there is a more urgent concern. As we have learned from the hacking, data dumps, privacy breaches, and security failures of recent years, nothing on the Internet is private, or if it is, it won’t be for long. The Internet and everything wired into it is public, or potentially public. That means your e-mails, direct messages, texts, online purchases, reading habits, and social-media comments will become easy fodder for the Peeping Toms and digital historians of the future. Connecting your home, office, and car to the Internet means anything that happens inside those formerly private spaces is similarly at risk of exposure to the wider world. Inviting a technology company into your living room is bad enough, but inviting one into your mind? You’d have to be crazy.

Not if you’re a Silicon Valley overlord, though. “This plan is so crazy, it just might work” was a classic plot convention of late-Baby Boomer, early Gen-X television culture, and tech visionaries seem to have internalized it. Bezos had the idea to start Amazon while driving alone across the country. He was evidently inspired by all those hours spent in solitary contemplation, because one of the wildest-dream projects that he supports is the 10,000-Year Clock. A 200-foot tall timekeeper built into the side of a mountain in West Texas, the clock has so far cost the multibillionaire north of $40 million. As Bezos told the Wall Street Journal in 2012: “The reason I’m doing it is that it is a symbol of long-term thinking . . . . We humans have become so technologically sophisticated that in certain ways we’re dangerous to ourselves. It’s going to be increasingly important over time for humanity to take a longer-term view of its future.” How ironic: Bezos, who has made several fortunes by selling the world a technologically sophisticated lifestyle of spiritual ease, material comfort, and high-touch customer service, now warns us that too much technological sophistication can be dangerous.

Elon Musk has used his billions to seed a range of companies with moonshots in mind. Tesla Inc. makes $90,000 electric cars and gigantic batteries (all highly subsidized by taxpayers). SpaceX is a private exploration firm that would love to give you a ride to Mars someday. (Musk thinks that we ought to colonize other planets.) Musk’s Boring Company is trying to convince state and local governments to let him dig tunnels throughout the U.S. so that another of his companies, Hyperloop, can solve the country’s traffic problems. Tech investor Peter Thiel poured money into the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to create sustainable floating cities on the earth’s vast oceans—another moonshot.

Silicon Valley’s billionaire CEOs understand that their wild plans will likely unleash reactionary social forces opposed to their disruptions. They know perfectly well that their gadgets, apps, self-driving cars, brain-mail programs, back-flipping robots, algorithm ads, surveillance toys, space elevators, floating cities, outer-space colonies, and all the rest will push humanity into an ever-more complete reliance on “smart machines” to do the kinds of low- or no-skill jobs that once provided satisfying livelihoods to millions. The Silicon Valley economy, as incredibly productive as it is, can’t provide jobs for every American who wants one. The techdaddies know that not everybody is cut out to be a Google engineer or a Facebook programmer—or even an Apple store Genius Bar service professional. One by one, the lower rungs of the economic and employment ladders could be lopped off by high-performance cyborgs that can cook and serve a meal, clean a house, fix a car, or teach a child to read, at almost no marginal cost. That’s going to cause a lot of disruption. Silicon Valley’s big brains could find themselves staring down the barrel of some serious social unrest. It’s not unreasonable to expect economic upheaval and potential resistance.

Naturally, visionaries that they are, the tech bosses aren’t stumbling blindly forward into this potentially chaotic future. They have already settled on a remedy: the universal basic income, a guaranteed minimum-welfare payment to everyone, regardless of income level, ability to work, or employment status. “A lot of exciting new innovations are going to be created, which will generate a lot of opportunities and wealth, but there is a real danger it could also reduce the amount of jobs,” wrote billionaire Virgin CEO Richard Branson in an August 2017 blog post. “This will make experimenting with ideas like basic income even more important in the years to come.”

The idea is simple: removing the need to fend for yourself in the ultra-sophisticated economy of the technium will free you to pursue your dreams of writing a novel, staying home with your kids, or starting that online business for which you could never quite find the time. The universal basic income will ensure that you never find yourself worrying about paying for, well, the basics. Food, clothing, and shelter will be well within your reach. Beyond that, how you pursue happiness will be up to you.

“We should make it so that no one is worried about how they’re going to pay for a place to live, no one has to worry about how they’re going to have enough to eat,” says Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, the influential Mountain View, California, “accelerator” fund that invests in tech startups. “Just give people enough money to have a reasonable quality of life.” It’s a nice theory, if paternalistic, but there are some obvious flaws. First, we don’t all agree on what level of income constitutes a “reasonable quality of life,” so someone will have to decide what that level is—probably someone with a tech leader’s proven talent for seeing around corners.

Here’s another problem: the techdaddies think that you won’t mind losing your old livelihood, since it was probably unfulfilling work and you probably hated pulling your tired, undereducated carcass out of bed in the morning, only to be insulted all day by your junior college-trained business-major boss who insisted on looking over your shoulder while you performed mindless manual labor for a few bucks more than minimum wage. If for some strange reason it turns out that you found satisfaction in providing for yourself and your family by driving a cab or working at the widget factory or waiting tables or cleaning motel rooms, they think you’ll be willing to accept the basic-income payoff as compensation for the disruption to your livelihood. It’s a win-win, as they see it: you get some free money and they don’t need to worry about you and your old pals from the shop floor coming after them with torches and pitchforks.

The universal basic income is a bribe, plain and simple—and Silicon Valley’s biggest names have lined up behind it. Musk says “it’s going to be necessary.” Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, views it as a tool for combating income inequality. Gates says we’re not ready for it yet, but we will be soon. Zuckerberg thinks of it as a “cushion” that allows you to “try new things.” After returning from a 2017 campaign-style trip to Alaska, a state that pays every resident an annual average oil-income dividend of $1,000, Zuckerberg said: “When you’re losing money, your mentality is largely about survival. But when you’re profitable, you’re confident about your future and you look for opportunities to invest and grow further. Alaska’s economy has historically created this winning mentality, which has led to this basic income.”

One of the selling points that Zuckerberg and his peers have seized on is that the universal basic income supposedly transcends the liberal/conservative ideological trap. It may seem like a dream cooked up in the liberal big-government kitchen, but universal basic income actually has roots in conservative economics. Free marketeers like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman supported the idea of what they called a “negative income tax,” under which anyone making below a certain annual income receives a cash payment from the government at tax time, rather than the other way around. Conservative intellectual Charles Murray has endorsed the idea of a $10,000 annual payment to everyone over 21. The Friedman approach, which lives on today in the American tax code as the Earned Income Tax Credit for families with children, has the virtue of rewarding work—the amount of the credit rises with each dollar of earned income. But often left out of the story are Friedman and Murray’s caveats, the prime one being that any guaranteed-income program should be offered in lieu of other welfare programs, not in addition to them.

“The proposal for a negative income tax is a proposal to help poor people by giving them money, which is what they need,” Friedman told William F. Buckley on a 1968 episode of Firing Line. “Rather than, as now, by requiring them to come before a governmental official, detail all their assets and their liabilities, and be told that you may spend X dollars on rent, Y dollars on food, et cetera, and then be given a handout.” When the tech leaders extol the “bipartisan” nature of the universal basic income, it’s not clear that they fully appreciate that they’re allying themselves with free-market conservatives who seek to empower individuals, promote personal responsibility, and dismantle the infrastructure of the welfare state that liberal Democrats have spent the last 80 years constructing.

Many on the left have an entirely different view of the universal basic income. To them, it seems like just the latest government safety-net program on the road to what they like to call Democratic socialism. That’s the happy kind of socialism, the kind that obtains in much of Europe, where a handful of national-champion businesses produce geysers of cash that the state then redistributes to the less productive and less educated members of society. Democratic socialism is the capitalist alternative where nobody can ever be fired, so nobody ever gets hired. Bill Gross, founder of the $1 trillion Newport Beach-based investment firm PIMCO, says that if a universal basic income “strikes you as a form of socialism, I would suggest we get used to it.”

Maybe it never occurs to the tech overlords that the industry their ingenuity has built, and the titanic wealth and prosperity they’ve personally enjoyed as a result of their success, has only been historically possible in a country like the United States, where a vibrant private economy is governed by relatively light regulation and relatively low taxes, robust property-rights protections and the rule of law, and an entrepreneurial culture that rewards risk-taking. Are they under the impression that Silicon Valley is the last industry that the world will ever know or need, so that we can safely shut down the 250-year-old American experiment, an experiment based not only in ordered liberty and limited government but also in work-based opportunity?

There are other, more practical issues to consider before signing over America’s economic future to the universal basic income. As urbanist and City Journalcontributing editor Aaron Renn points out, such a program would require far more restrictive immigration controls than many on the left would probably tolerate. Basic-income boosters, writes Renn, frequently gloss over the thornier ethical issues that the idea presents, including a vision that he calls “morally problematic, even perverse: individuals are entitled to a share of social prosperity but have no obligation to contribute anything to it.”

Yet this has always been the ethic governing almost every Silicon Valley innovation. “Information wants to be free,” partisans of the early Internet used to insist. From Napster to YouTube, the digital ethos has been to fling open the gates and invite all comers; to drive established industries into the proverbial ditch by offering the products they once sold at no cost—or below cost; to undermine America’s bourgeois values and hollow out its mediating institutions; to boldly go where no man has gone before. To the tech leaders and their followers, the past is a vast wasteland of ugly ideas, simple machines, hot wars, and petty political squabbles. Nothing truly creative ever happened there until Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft. The world had little purpose, and almost no beauty, until Steve Jobs and Jony Ive gave it the iPhone.

In part, this relentless focus on the glorious future derives from the entrepreneurial culture of risk that permeates Silicon Valley, where past failures are merely prerequisites for future success. But it also derives from the riddle that all successful people must grapple with: am I successful because I’m superior, or am I superior because I’m successful? Almost all of the techdaddies appear to have concluded that their own superiority is what drove their success. Perhaps the most successful moneymakers of every age similarly succumb to such hubris. But unlike yesteryear’s robber barons, the tech overlords have achieved almost unimaginable levels of wealth and accomplishment at alarmingly young ages—some are still in their late thirties. Their success has given them the means to remake society, their sense of superiority has given them the inherent right to do so, and their youth has given them the time.

Beware of the ‘Woke’ Tech Oligarchs

Mark ZuckerbergOnce the rich protected themselves by aligning with Republicans who would protect their property from high taxes and their firms from regulation.

Some still do — notably the Koch brothers — but this breed of right-winger is gradually losing out to more progressive tilted plutocrats. In 2016, according to Open Secrets, three of the four largest billionaire political donors — hedge fund manager James Simon and his wife Marilyn, Michael Bloomberg, and currency speculator George Soros — titled progressive. This reflects a broader social trend.

Overall the GOP continues to slightly outpace Democrats among the ultra rich, but most of the big conservative donors such as Charles and David Koch, Sheldon Adelson, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, Rupert Murdoch, and Irvine Chairman Don Bren are well into their seventies or in their eighties. The trend belongs, clearly, to the progressives. Between 1980 to 2016, support for Democrats from the 0.1 percent has tripled, and donors in the nation’s wealthiest ZIP codes overall now give more to Democrats than Republicans.

Take Michael Bloomberg, the former Republican of convenience who last week announced he would invest $80 million into Democratic campaigns this fall before teasing, yet again, a possible presidential run of his own. Bloomberg’s usual causes are not those of traditional social democracy — after all this is the guy who proclaimed what New York really needed was more billionaires, and who beta-tested in New York City the businessman-as-better-political-leader pitch he then watched with dismay Donald Trump take all the way to the White House — but issues less threatening to the plutocracy, such as climate change and gun control.

The buyout of mainstream progressivism has changed its nature. Big donor-driven candidates — who still dominate the party’s leadership ranks, even as small-donor powered insurgents like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez test that arrangement, at least in low-turnout elections — are less concerned with the fate of auto or communication workers than they are with issues of environmental regulation, identity, and culture.

Facebook President Sean Parker, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Salesforce.com Chairman Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, and the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, are all relatively young men devoted to the progressive cause — at least those parts of it that don’t threaten their bottom lines.

The Trump Effect

With his horrendous comments and awful actions, Trump has accelerated wokeism among the wealthy and their minions. This oligarchic drift has been building for years, as wealth has shifted from traditional resource and manufacturing industries to software, media, finance, and entertainment. In sharp contrast to energy firms, home-builders, and farmers, the regulatory state does not threaten the bottom lines of these industries, as long as it refrains from breaking up their virtual monopolies.

Indeed, as researcher Greg Ferenstein suggests, the new oligarchs favor an active state that will subsidize worker housing or even a guaranteed minimum income, and keep their businesses off the hook for providing decent benefits to their ever expanding cadre of gig-economy serfs. He points out that the former head of Uber, Travis Kalanick, was a strong supporter of Obamacare and that many top tech executives — including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk — favor a government-provided guaranteed annual wage to help, in part, allay fears about what happens to most of the workforce as their industries and jobs are “disrupted.”

Geography plays a role here as well. With the biggest concentrations of wealth now in the most “progressive” regions — the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and Seattle — moguls must operate in an environment dominated by fervent anti-Trump social-justice and green advocacy. Many big tech employees — nearly 40 percent in the Bay Area, by some estimates — are noncitizens, with little reason to be concerned about how the wealth in these corners is, or is not, spread across the nation.

So it’s no surprise that woke employees at Microsoft, horrified by the brutalism of Trump’s immigration policies, have decided not to cooperate with ICE. Not to be outdone, Amazon workers compare their company’s cooperation with immigration authorities to IBM’s collaboration with Nazi Germany. Similarly Google workers are refusing to help with drones used to combat terrorists, while Apple is actively working to make it difficult for police to break into phones used in committing crimes, including in the aftermath of the San Bernardino terrorist massacre.

So powerful, and self-referential, are these companies — and their highly compensated workers — that they are increasingly willing to deny even the idea of national interest when that does not suit their political notions. Unlike businesses that worry about competition or mass opinion, these oligarchic companies can demonize half of the country with impunity. At the end of the day, even Trumpians depend on these systems unless they want to look at Chinese alternatives.

The New Controllers

Since Trump’s election, many progressives have pushed the idea that we are on the cusp of a return to traditional authoritarianism, as portrayed in books like George Orwell’s 1984 or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Yet the real model for future tyranny may be more that of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which portrays a society run by a biologically conditioned scientific and technological elite.

In Brave New World, the masters are not hoary Stalinoids or angry right-wing fundamentalists, but gentle, reasoned executives. The Controllers preside over a society where social classes are well-defined, and only those at the top — the Alphas — live in comfort. Families have been abolished except on reservations for misfits, and people widely enjoy access to pleasurable pharmaceuticals and unconstrained, commitment-free sex in the city.

Huxley’s future eerily resembles the one favored by the oligarchs, who are now paying women workers to freeze their eggs as they aim to create an elite Alpha class without children or property, to be serviced by the low-wage Deltas, Gammas, and Epsilons of Huxley’s world — bused in from the suburban fringes.

The Controller’s power, first and foremost, depends on implanting information. In Brave New World contrary ideas are dismissed not as breaking the party line but as simply absurd or even pornographic. Today’s woke oligarchs do much the same by controlling both information and culture. Bloomberg is a prime example but he’s a pauper compared to Bezos, the world’s richest man owning one of the nation’s most influential newspapers.

Tech sofa change in recent years also helped Mark Zuckerberg’s college roommate buy The New Republic, and run it into the ground before selling it. More recently Laurene Powell, the left-leaning widow of the late Steve Jobs (net worth $20 billion), scooped up The Atlantic for a nonprofit that will compete with more traditional competitors who still, sadly, have to make money.

Meanwhile, Google is promoting journalism by robots while also planning to invest $300 million in favored outlets. What could go wrong?

The Agenda

In the emerging regime, here’s what’s not important: personal autonomy and privacy. A controlled and woke society starts with access to people’s thoughts, something critical to the advertising-driven businesses of Google and Facebook and, increasingly, also to Apple and Microsoft. It’s important to remember what Google’s former Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt once told CNBC: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

The digital revolution, which had so much promise for democratizing information, appears to be hyper-concentrating media both geographically, on the coasts, and through pipelines controlled overwhelmingly by firms like Facebook, so that a change in policy there can undermine even established media, and Google, which controls over a thirdof all on-line advertising and a remarkable 90 percent of global search. As The Guardian recently put it: “If ExxonMobil attempted to insert itself into every element of our lives like this, there might be a concerted grassroots movement to curb its influence.”

These patterns are reinforced by students shaped by our ideologically homogeneous education system. The censorious instinct now intrinsic to universities, particularly the elite ones, shapes the thoughts of the highly educated workers critical to these companies. Controllers like those at Facebook increasingly seek to “curate” views, largely conservative, they don’t like, according to former employees. Often this censorship is being carried out under guidance developed by largely progressive groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has too often labeled anyone outside its ideological “safe space” as racist bigots. Over 70 percent of Americans, notes a recent Pew study, believe social media platforms “censor political views.”

Ultimately the oligarchs, reacting to their woke workers and constituency, seek a control over basic behavior in ways even the snoop-crazy Chinese would admire. Facebook already admits to having patented technology that would allow them to snoop on their users, although they deny using it. Netflix, the oligarchical company that by some estimates is now worth more than any of the movie studios, recently imposed controls over what people do on sets of movies they finance. That includes rules that ban asking for phone numbers of co-workers or even looking at people for more than five seconds, an innovation even more intrusive than those of Huxley’s Controllers.

Hypocritical Oaths

Stanley Bing’s recently released Immortal Life gives a riveting version of a near-future society shaped by our tech oligarchs. In his not-so-distant future, government has largely been replaced by a cabal of superannuated tech moguls — effectively Global Controllers — who shape societal views, implant devices in human brains, and dominate every aspect of the economy. Democracy hasn’t just been constrained; it’s been excised.

Right now the rising power of the Controllers has been obscured by the Trumpian counterrevolution, a peasant rebellion supported by a less than charming alliance of old economy moguls, angry white males, and more than few xenophobic racists. But over the long term, history is bending toward the woke oligarchy—particularly as the old generation conveniently dies off.

If these well-heeled progressives have a vulnerability, it’s their extreme hypocrisy. In California, the epicenter of the resistance and elite wokefulness, Silicon Valley oligarchs and their shrieky Hollywood counterparts are fervent in their embrace of progressive values. But, as a new report from Chapman University shows, the prevailing oligarch-friendly California economic agenda — hostile to suburbs, fossil-fuel energy, and manufacturing — has proven unequal and particularly damaging to minorities.

Not without reason has the maverick environmentalist Mike Shellenberger called California “the most racist” state in the union. Far from Malibu and swanky haunts of the cultural elites, the bulk of Los Angeles suffers among the highest poverty rates of any metropolitan areas. Cost-adjusted wages for middle-class workers, Latinos, and African Americans in Silicon Valley have actually dropped during the recent economic boom there.

Perhaps there’s no better illustration of hypocrisy than the Disney company. The once conservative bastion-turned-promoter of woke values has been led by Robert Iger, a fantastically well-compensated self-defined “progressive,” who has made much of denouncing President Trump’s immigration policy as “cruel and misguided ” and taking standard progressive positions on guns and the Paris accords. Yet, as Bernie Sanders has pointed out recently, Disney workers are generally poorly paid, many on the verge of poverty. Even middle-class workers have been given the shiv: The company infamously replaced its IT workers with outside contractors shipped in from India.

Against the Oligarchs

This unprecedented agglomeration of wealth and power needs to be opposed both by conservatives and traditional progressives. It won’t be easy. In the presidential run, The Washington Post took hard aim at Bernie Sanders before turning, albeit less successfully, against Trump. More recently Amazon and its minions forced Seattle’s progressives to back down from a plan to make the company pay more taxes. Majority Leader Charles Schumer opposes higher capital-gains rates, warming the cockles of venture capitalists and the new economic royalists, some of whom are his contributors.

Even on green issues, the famously pious oligarchs demonstrate remarkable levels of hypocrisy. These firms have bought enough allowances and built solar or wind facilities to claim “carbon neutrality.” But such offsets, as the new Chapman report reveals, mostly shuffle greenhouse gases around and don’t actually reduce global emissions. Apple keeps its California carbon footprint down by making all its products abroad, mostly in China — which ends up spewing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than if they built them here.

Ultimately the only way to stop the new Controllers and challenge their hypocrisy will be to meet them head on. Companies like Google need to be broken up, as many on both right and left agree. This position has even been adopted by the generally liberal Boston Globe which warned that, “Never ever in the history of the world has a single company had so much control over what people know and think.”

But it’s not just Google — which spends more on lobbying than any other private company—or Amazon, which has quadrupled its government spending since 2014. This relatively new focus on inside Washington influence-peddling, combined with their oversized influence on critical technologies, our media, and overall economic system makes these firms a threat to the pluralism essential to democracy, unlike any we have seen in the last century. Their vision presages a society where few work and a handful control the nation’s riches. To avoid a rebellion, the “redundant” are supposed to be paid off with some sort of government allowance.

Americans need to oppose this evolution and fight for the flourishing of a grassroots and more dispersed economy now, before the oligarchs brave new world is fully and finally here.

ditor of NewGeography.com and Presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University

This piece originally appeared on The Daily Beast.

Cross-posted at New Geography.

Bay Area companies paying employees to protest Trump

While many conservative claims about paid protesters demonstrating against President Trump have been met with skepticism and dismissal — in the Bay Area — some of them might actually be getting money for being there.

Companies in the region are increasingly offering their employees paid time off to participate in protests, marches and other demonstrations as part of civic engagement policies.

“Democracy is a participatory institution; it’s not just something that takes place every four years when you have a candidate in a race,” Adam Kleinberg, CEO of San Francisco ad firm Traction, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

The company gives its workers two paid “Days of Action” per year.

Furthermore, tech giants like Facebook recently allowed their employees to take a day of paid leave to participate in the May Day immigration rights demonstration in San Francisco — a rally that was largely a protest of Trump’s agenda.

“At Facebook, we’re committed to fostering an inclusive workplace where employees feel comfortable expressing their opinions and speaking up,” a spokesman explained in an emailed statement. “We support our people in recognizing International Workers’ Day and other efforts to raise awareness for safe and equitable employment conditions.”

Major tech figures like Facebook COO Sharly Sandberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin have all spoken out against the president, illustrating this administration’s frosty relationship with the industry.

And even those who showed a willingness to work with the White House have faced a wave of scrutiny. For example, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick resigned from the president’s business advisory council earlier this year after facing intense backlash, seeing #DeleteUber trend at the top of Twitter over his decision to offer guidance on a job growth agenda.

The policies appear to reflect a growing discontent in the heavily liberal region that Trump presents more than just policy differences — but an existential threat to their well being and daily life.

“It’s a recognition of the fact that civic engagement is something that we should be doing not just as individuals but as a company,” Buoyant CEO William Morgan told CS Monitor about his software company’s policy. “I wanted to make it more clear that we could not be passive citizens in this world.”

While the policies aren’t new — as companies like Comcast have been offering such leave for years — they appear to be taking on new life in the Trump era.

“People were wishing that I was dropped off in an (Islamic State) territory, calling me an idiotic libtard, candy-ass, saying they hope we’ll go out of business. Really nasty stuff,” Kleinberg told the Chronicle about the backlash to the policy.

Overall, Trump’s policy proposals have been met with a particularly strong response in Silicon Valley due to his stance on issues like the controversial H-1B visa program that tech companies say they rely on to recruit top talent — but one critics say comes at the expense of American workers.

And the president’s rhetoric may be having some effect, as the number of H-1B applications dropped to under 200,000 in 2017 — a 15 percent decrease from a year earlier.

This piece was originally published by CalWatchdog.com

Why the American Conservative Union Declined Meeting with Zuckerberg, Facebook

WASHINGTON DC — This past weekend, a senior representative from Facebook contacted me to invite American Conservative Union to attend a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg and other conservative leaders to discuss the allegations that Facebook suppressed conservative content. We appreciate their invitation, especially since our organization and annual conference, CPAC, were specifically targeted.

However, we do not believe that the problem between Facebook and CPAC and the broader conservative community is merely a communication problem. Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg are drawing the wrong conclusion from the negative response from conservatives. It appears that they believe they can avoid having to answer for their actions by hosting conservative luminaries at their state-of-the-art headquarters.

Facebook has a history of agitating against conservatives and conservative policies, especially when it comes to ACU’s own conference, CPAC.  The facts are:

1) Facebook staff has admitted to suppressing content about CPAC.

2) Facebook rejected ACU’s overtures for Facebook to play a meaningful role at CPAC.

3) The deck is stacked:  CPAC content egregiously underperforms on Facebook compared to Twitter and other platforms by factors of 10.

4) The Facebook Trending News Chief, Tom Stocky is a maxed-out donor to Hillary Clinton.

5) Of the 1,000 political donations from Facebook employees, 80 percent have gone to liberals.

6) Facebook holds liberal positions on important issues such as privacy, property and priests.

We will not be attending this meeting. We know one meeting cannot possibly resolve all of the above mentioned issues.

ACU would, of course, prefer to have real engagement with Facebook about whether pastors and priests can have full access to Facebook, or if we could come to terms on the FCC’s intrusive rule-making on privacy, or how we could actually protect intellectual property owners.

Facebook has harmed its credibility with conservatives, but if they want to mend the relationship, we’re happy to sit down with their experts about how they can better strike a balance between sterile algorithms choosing news content and when a human curator decides to put a finger on the scale. If Facebook wants the benefit of the doubt, they need to start with complete transparency on how decisions are made concerning its newsfeeds.

Inducing people to sign-up for a Facebook account under the potentially fraudulent assertion that the company is neutral on news content has serious repercussions. We applaud Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune’s (R-SD/ACU Life Rating: 86 percent) efforts to ask the tough questions so Facebook users can know the truth.

This is much bigger than just having a meeting with “leading conservatives,” and winning the day’s news cycle.  The Gizmodo story has exposed the rift between Facebook’s liberal perspective and the hundred million Americans who self-identify as conservative.   We hope to have substantive interactions that can begin to resolve these issues.