
The Silicon Oligarchy - wheresvic3
https://themargins.substack.com/p/the-silicon-oligarchy?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMDYwNDE2NCwicG9zdF9pZCI6NTQzOTE1LCJfIjoieFFrWkoiLCJpYXQiOjE1OTI1NTU0NzcsImV4cCI6MTU5MjU1OTA3NywiaXNzIjoicHViLTY2ODMiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.LnUmkJ5oBydiuAjz5ljbHGRHeqaIezIo8S4oni7nHMo
======
zpeti
I love this new narrative that allowing the president of the USA to
communicate on the largest platform in the world is siding with him or being
in alliance with him.

At least be honest and say that you want Zuckerberg to censor and police
trump. That’s the truth. But don’t pretend that somehow it’s immoral to allow
the US President to post on your platform. He’s the president, whether you
like it or not.

~~~
ramraj07
The president didn't post a video making cupcakes. He explicitly reused a
racist phrase to suggest the black protesters should be shot down. Anyone else
making this comment would have been flagged but not the president.

Zuckerberg is not the kid in the social network movie who's "not an asshole,
you're just trying really hard to be one." No one has ever said a single good
thing about him, or his partner Sandberg, in a long time. By all measures they
seem to be selfish people who have nothing else in their minds other than
keeping and growing the power they have now. The only other thing they are now
famous for is how they manipulate good founders of great products with false
promises and then kick them out to consolidate even more power. At least
that's all you can tell from what little we know of these billionaire
oligarchs lives.

In the end, I'm going to hypothesize that America became a great country
because for a while some of its leaders and rich people at least tried to do
_some_ good things to its people and try to be the better person now and then.
Given the degree to which every single rich person and politician in power
seems self-obsessed if not overtly corrupt, it doesn't bode too well for the
life of the common man in America or anywhere else for the matter.

I'm not particularly worried about WW3 though, because I don't see any good
country left behind to fight every totalitarian nation that's getting created
now.

~~~
golergka
I may be a bit out of context of American politics, so an honest question
here: how a threat to looters, who actively commit a crime, without any
reference to skin color, can be racist?

Seeing how violent these riots can get, that phrase is exactly what I would
love to hear from authorities as black business owner, for example.

~~~
hackissimo123
Trump used the the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" as
part of a longer series of Tweets about the riots. The same phrase was also
said at least once before, by an obscure racist 70 years ago whom no-one had
heard of before the Tweet. Some have drawn the conclusion that Trump was in
fact making a deliberate reference to this obscure racist.

~~~
golergka
> The same phrase was also said at least once before, by an obscure racist 70
> years ago

I have to come clean: I haven't been completely intellectually honest in
asking the question above. I have already known about it.

The point is, I have a problem with the way present-day american political
life has a way with meanings of words. You guys seem to put so much importance
on imaginary dog-whistels and connotations, and are willing to interpret the
original phrases in such bizzare and far-fetched ways.

And if we continue to play this game, the only ones who win are the people
that are willingly interpret anything in the most offensive and divisive way.

~~~
082349872349872
speaking of interpretations, this is what I read in the local paper: "Facebook
removes Trump Ad due to Nazi symbol"
[https://www.srf.ch/news/international/wegen-nazi-symbol-
face...](https://www.srf.ch/news/international/wegen-nazi-symbol-facebook-
loescht-trump-werbung)

~~~
082349872349872
found in english: [https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-facebook-trump/facebook-
ta...](https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-facebook-trump/facebook-takes-down-
trump-ads-over-organized-hate-policy-idUKKBN23P3AJ)

As you all point out, this could simply be highly unfortunate coincidence. I
would advise the white house to try internally circulating campaigns for
feedback _before_ running them.

(a flight of fancy: the infamous Antifa agent Max Isayev, as part of a highly
structured plot —supported not only by the FBI, but also by Thurn und Taxis
and the Trans Scouts of America— to prevent Trump's reelection, has gone deep
undercover at Fox under the name of Seymour Buttz, and has been both
circulating memes with unfortunate connotations among the Base and flashing
subliminal emoji during programming, confident that in the US things that
happened in WW2 are even less part of common knowledge than things that
Ancient Astronaut theorists believe, making it more likely his nefarious
"suggestions" will intermittently seep into campaign material with the
innocents none the wiser.)

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abellerose
I assume the US has always been an oligarchy and never truly a democracy at
the federal level. The American people just get to vote from either the two
parties that desire whoever to be elected and where hundreds of millions are
spent with a lot of nonsense that's off-topic.

Understandably tech is arguably in infancy but nothing like the decades before
today. So the tech monopolies of today weren't a thing before but people had
so much opportunity in the earliest years; that resulted in money being easy
to be made with little concern of whatever outcome. Nowadays platforms control
most of the market and people are now starting to notice an oligarchy in tech.
Resulting in concern propagating in recent years.

It's well known a lot of people in society don't have a voice and when they're
wronged by the system(s) of society; whether it be authoritarian or not. I'm
unsure if we can really prove current day is worse or better than previously
in history regarding to having a voice/impact when being wronged. My question
is how do we justly blame a worse outcome on a tech oligarchy and when we
cannot know the foregoing being worse or better than the past?

~~~
082349872349872
The pre-internet saying was "freedom of the press is for those who own one."
(journalists like to think of themselves as professionals, but publishers are
not journalists. These days I guess we have to mention that random people with
a truck and vlog are "journalists" in the same sense that random people with
headphones and an open incognito tab are "scientists")

For your amusement, WASP self-parody:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0)
"haters like to ???? ?? our ivy league education / but they're just jealous
'cause our families run the nation"

(as far as I can tell, this commerical was only aired in New England. That's
OK, the P-word is their word, they can use it. "Sloane Ranger" for our brit
friends, I suppose. It's "Goldküstenmilieu" here. What is the term in your
countries?)

------
ohazi
s/Silicon/Tech/

I thought this was going to be about Intel/TSMC/Samsung/GlobalFoundries.
There's barely any Silicon in the valley anymore.

------
Havoc
>a Chinese president gets first dibs on naming Zuckerberg’s kids.

That's pretty bizarre even by Zuck's standards

~~~
lostmsu
Think of it as a diplomatic move against straight up invasion.

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foobar_
Bully's once they grow up have to adopt a veneer facade of goodness to hide
that plain fact that they are still the same. In such cases it's usually the
actions that speak the truth because the words are always meant to hide greed
and sadism.

------
tumetab1
Please remove what looks like a tracking token from the URL.

Untracked URL [https://themargins.substack.com/p/the-silicon-
oligarchy](https://themargins.substack.com/p/the-silicon-oligarchy)

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cinquemb
Tools of the national security™ apparatus and its profiteers repurposed for
domestic use[0]:

2014 CFR discussion[1]: "… What about Twitter? I have no idea what Twitter is
good for. But if it flips out every tyrant in the Middle East, I'm
interested." \- Michael Rogers, Founder, Practical Futurist; Futurist-in-
Residence, New York Times Company

[0][1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15623278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15623278)

------
swiley
This is why it’s so important to avoid closed software and especially avoid
software that depends on network services run by individual companies.

~~~
hackissimo123
I agree, but how? Everyone I know uses WhatsApp. If I close my Facebook
account I lose my only method of contacting a great deal of people who I used
to know and don't want to lose touch with. How do I get off these platforms
when no-one else will?

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trabant00
> As the Black Lives Matter demonstrations gained momentum and the police
> response became increasingly violent, I found myself reliving what Turkey
> has gone through, but in English.

In some cases in these US protests/revolts the authorities stepped completely
back allowing looters and vandals complete reign over some areas. That's the
complete opposite of what happened in Turkey.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
And in many, many places, there's no looting etc. Its a protest, and the
public responds positively. But not news-worthy I guess.

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cryptica
I'm not convinced at all that Mark Zuckerberg likes Trump. He just did it to
play "good cop bad cop".

I've seen this kind of "good cop bad cop" charade a lot recently. Not just in
the news but also in real life at my last company. You have one person acting
like the bad guy using extreme arguments and another person acting like the
good guy using less extreme arguments (though also undesirable) - this
encourages people to side with the less extreme position instead of
recognizing that they are both undesirable options.

IMO the 'employee walkout' by FB was just a charade in this good cop bad cop
game. In a highly divided society, this is the most effective way to persuade
people to do what you want. It creates a slow but predictable decline. Within
a decade, people will think of the once extreme position as being totally
reasonable.

Then they will keep playing the game; it's going to get a point that the good
cop will be offering people to take huge salary cuts while the bad cop will be
offering to abolish salaries altogether and provide food vouchers instead.
There will be some overhanging narrative that we have limited resources and
each one of us should do our bit to conserve those resources.

------
hoseja
I had hoped it would be about how there are so very few top-tier fabs.

------
zxcb1
VECTORALISTS

~~~
aspenmayer
Would you care to elaborate?

How am I doing so far?

> According to McKenzie Wark when information becomes a commodity it means we
> will only be able to see the information produced by the vectoral class.
> This is because they are the ones whose profits depend on the scarcity of
> information. So when information becomes intellectual property we are bound
> to repeat the same commodity form, because this is what the market decrees.
> She states that the “hack” which monetizes information introduces the
> “vectoralist” class.

> It is the hacker class that produces new information, free from the
> restrictions of a property form. This however is then used by the vectoral
> class, who own and control the means of production of information on an
> industrial scale and mediates connections and access to information (Paolo
> Pedercini, the founder of the radical games project Molleindustria cites
> companies like Google, Uber or Airbnb as typical representatives of the
> vectoral class). The hacker and the vectoral class aren’t always at odds
> with each other. They can compromise on the free flow of information and the
> extraction of wealth from this information to fund its development. Think of
> the open source movement, Reddit and Wikipedia. McKenzie Wark believes that
> the hacker class should ally themselves with the other producing classes so
> that they together don’t have to answer to the vectoral class anymore.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto)

------
proc0
tl;dr: I'm from Turkey and "orange man bad"

So boring and unoriginal, missing one side completely and spinning it as
unbiased, when it's borderline propaganda. C'mon.

~~~
pjc50
It turns out that the orange man _is_ bad, in many of the same ways that
Erdogan is bad.

~~~
proc0
Nah. It's more true everybody is brainwashed because people are scared to
think for themselves.

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bsanr2
>One of my new grand theories is that America lags 5-7 years behind emerging
markets when it comes to the impact of American companies on society. And now,
whatever heaven and hell tech companies have wrought upon the emerging markets
is now on our doorstep.

This dovetails quite nicely with my conviction that whatever fortune or
misfortune that's allowed to visit American blacks will eventually hit the
rest of the country. Widespread housing insecurity? Check. Drug epidemic?
Check. Voting rights crisis? See you in November.

~~~
pjc50
> quite nicely with my conviction that whatever fortune or misfortune that's
> allowed to visit American blacks will eventually hit the rest of the country

One of my wilder observations is that, while the conspiracy theorists are
wrong, they're "exactly wrong": the unevidenced thing looks a bit like
something that actually happened but with completely different details.

The thing they're worried about is the US doing to white people what it's
already done to nonwhite people. Illegal medical experiments? Tuskeegee. "FEMA
camps"? The post-Katrina mess. COINTELPRO? Already deployed against civil
rights leaders in the 60s and 70s.

~~~
lostmyoldone
It kind of makes sense, actually.

We're extremely good pattern matchers, much more than we are aware of, but it
stand to reason that as our more complex survival mechanisms seems to have
close ties to how we perceive ourselves and maybe our "group", we become
really terrible at correctly matching what we intuit, if "we" can be
considered the perpetrator.

Hypothesizing that we are part of the victims is also a much more effective
strategy for the group if we're in a fear/survival mode, as an erroneous
attribution often only presents a post-facto moral dilemma for a few
individuals, a dilemma we can shield our ego from by saying we didn't know.

That we didn't know is also often objectively true as long as we disregard the
uncanny notion that research on social interaction has let us understand
exists, that our brain doesn't always let (most of) us know everything that it
is going on if it will harm the social interaction.

Most of the above is not much of a problem when that group is a group of
people in the middle of a forest, but becomes very much a problem if it is
almost the entire population of a country, and when we as in the current day
and time is obsessed with polishing our ego.

