Situational Outrage — Masters of the Universe Looking Ripe for Disruption
Ok, let us get this straight: The words and ideas of Alex Jones and InfoWars are unacceptable, but the words to an ultra-violent Snoop Dogg rap song pass muster no problem. One gets ejected from Apple podcasts, the other gets promoted on the iTunes home page. Jones lies, talking about conspiracy to coax web traffic. …that’s funny, because CNN does the same thing. Last year CNN ran a story that was completely false, attempting to tie Anthony Scaramucci to a $10 billion Russian Investment fund. It was a total, complete, outright, calculated lie. CNN gets lauded and we’re condemned like prisoners in Guantanamo to having no choice but to see it — and hear it — everywhere we look when we’re in airports. Jones got exterminated by Apple, Google, Facebook, and Spotify (but not Twitter). hmmm…
No, seriously — this matters. “Hateful content?” Have you listened to a 50 Cent song recently? Louis Farrakhan is all over the social web (including Twitter) promoting dangerous calls to action. Inciting violence or suggesting harm to another human? Kathy Griffin, who portrayed a grisly image of decapitating the President of the United States, still has a warm, safe residence on Twitter last time we checked. Anybody see asymmetry there?
In our view, there is a very slippery slope when companies and organizations in general decide it is their job to protect the general public from scammers and bad ideas. If they try it, they had better achieve symmetry.
A good example of this is the “snowflake” trend in colleges, where the schools leap in to protect students who are “triggered” by anyone saying something they don’t agree with. The claims are heartily honored from students espousing left-leaning and “social justice” ideologies, but the compassion easily evaporates for opposing views.
Google fired an employee for posting something that could be interpreted by others as “offensive.” The problem is that once you decide to get into the business of legislating morality, you need to be consistent. Any decent parent knows this. If you discipline one kid for lying, when their sister does the same thing (a lie, but perhaps on a different subject), she needs the same order of consequence. Otherwise, the ruled party gets confused, and a very deep-seated anger takes root.
The long-range impact of this coddling and dissonance is the rise of a weak youth culture, one where late-stage adolescents need “clinical” experts like Jordan Peterson to step in and teach them not to take free candy from strangers.
In Google’s case, they only punish the speech of employees when left-leaning employees claim to be offended. Their corporate monoculture is so insulated, arrogant, and self-referential that they actually don’t know they are inconsistent in their dishing out of consequences. At least we hope their bias is that good-natured :-) The alternative is too scary to contemplate for long.
Let’s take the investment world. Now there’s a hotbed of scamming and harm to others. That world is loosely regulated by the SEC. Now, it seems to us that they at least try to be even-handed in whom they punish for scamming. We can look at Enron, Michael Milken, Barry Minkow (long live ZZZZ Best!), Martha Stewart, Bernie Madoff, Allen Stanford, Ivan Boesky, and, recently, Elizabeth Holmes as they join the pantheon of criminal fraudsters who got caught. But even then, tons of people lost fortunes long before the SEC came into the picture. So there’s no way they can protect all the little naive/dumb investors. The scammers are soooooooo…good at it…
This investment game has exploded in complexity recently with the spawning of digital day-trading, cloud-based crowd-funding (here are the totally bizarre rules for this dark alley), and most recently with the mother of all investment scams — cryptocurrencies. No matter how big and complex the protection mechanism becomes, or how smart it thinks it is, it is pretty hopeless to try plugging all the holes in the scam dike. Last year even corporate cadaver Kodak tried to fake a crypto offering — we’re not kidding… no really, film is making a comeback, …right…
Wait, take a minute and watch this video — we at MIXology are committed to acknowledging genius when we see it, and this is a prime example — presenting the Bitcoin scam, courtesy of the Ultra Spiritual Life guy:
As far as we’re concerned, this recent spasm of corporate Situational Outrage and radical morality against InfoWars is an absurd attempt to stand in the way of the intellectual equivalent of Darwinism. If you swat the moderate fly of Alex Jones, get ready to confront the cesspool of hip hop, the festering sanctimony of fake news, and lord help you as you evaluate each Russian election ad.
The Supreme Court actually has taken on this issue, as related to speech, and their prescription was wise beyond its years. They ruled in 1927 that bad speech is best followed by more speech — NOT enforced silence.
This is a bigger problem than Alex Jones, people.
On the legal and “liability” level, the Silicon Valley monoculture might just be its own enemy when it comes to forfeiting their protected status as agnostic “platforms” under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In a convulsion of political correctness, they have now revealed with unprecedented clarity that they are not neutral public forums. Instead, they are editorial-driven publishers that become instantly liable for the terabytes of true hate speech that they enable, curate, promote, and distribute.
Let the class action suits (and the rise of lawyers in suits) begin.
The solution? Two scenarios:
First, if you try to enforce “objectionable” content, set a bar and hold it — and if InfoWars is over the line, you bet your laser level CNN is, too. So define the line carefully. Humanity will be all the better for it. Yes, boundaries can be a good thing.
Second, the alternative is to honor the Communications Decency Act and be a neutral public forum. And remember, if you engage a black box “algorithm” to filter on subject matter, you’re not neutral, any more so than the driver of an autonomous car is indemnified from crashing into a guard rail, or God forbid, a cyclist. And while we’re at it, you know, this “algorithm” thing is so insidious. It’s the 2018 version of a mafia don ordering a hit through a “contractor.” It’s still a hit. A dead fish on the doorstep threat, two broken knees, or worse.
And the scary version of this power grab, and it is a power grab, has a nasty end-game at scale. Remember, the books were burned by Hitler as part of a progressive extermination of a way of thinking he didn’t like. It was the ultimate form of immorality up to his time — what started as the invisible removal of certain ideas, and ended up as overt genocide. But remember, Hitler didn’t do the killing, he had an “algorithm” he programmed— it was called the Gestapo.
The keyword to watch as this new world of cyber reality unfolds: “Rank.” …how appropriate is that? It means to judge and assign relative priority, using a particular value system, and thereby projecting a hierarchy. Literally. It also means having a foul or offensive smell. As in “rank search,” “rank trends,” “rank conversations,” and “rank timeline” for relevance. Google, Twitter, and Facebook do all these things. Using a black-box, hidden algorithm.
Rank Corporations…
Invisible Ledgers, Revenues & Regulation — Rise of the Clones
Today, we have about seven men (they are all men) who control the Global Digital Mindspace. These men — you know who they are — come from effectively identical ideological orientations. They operate and dictate the mind-cycle of the populace in a new kind of Cyber State. This pseudo reality is not geo-referenced. It is not “global” either. See, the globe loses relevance in this new reality. People have moved to a new interconnected cyber space where they are linked by pixels and photons, bits and RF waves. Every behavior is tracked. Clicks, links, voice calls, sign-ons, location movements, daily patterns, and social graphs. In this always-on mobile device environment, certain Digital Industrial monopolies take on a hyper-cultural influence. They monitor behavior, they accumulate data warehouses, and they manipulate the content headspace of those being monitored. All at the same time. We are proposing entities and companies with this type of power and leverage be classified as “Ledgeropolies.” (a new word we invented)…
These enterprises don’t just have “big data.” They have big data AND they hold court over what people see and hear. This is an important subtlety. They don’t tell the members of their “ecosystem” that they control what is seen and heard, by the way. Instead they silently promote or “disappear” things they like and don’t like, respectively.
To control what a society thinks, first control what that society thinks about.
The mechanisms of filtering and content control vary. Facebook limits the “reach” of a post by invisible natural language analysis and tracking. That’s in addition to whether the source pays money to Facebook. Google silences a company or a person’s voice — or an article critical of Google — by having those sources appear as item 35,452 in search results. Apple makes a podcast not searchable. All of these enterprises (including Twitter, Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify) are in a position to move thoughts they like to the fore in all their publishing outlets. All of these decisions are optimized by the ledger on each consumer’s past behavior and status in the hierarchy of compliance that the company defines. And this is all done with 100% plausible deniability because the “algorithm” is kept a secret.
The U.S. government has a lot of data. But they don’t have the second attribute of a ledgeropoly — they don’t arbitrate what people see and hear. So while the surveillance state is a scary thing, it is a game of badminton compared to the grand influence and exploitation potential of a ledgeropoly. Right now the U.S. government is a powerless observer of the age of the ledgeropoly. But they can regain relevant status if they begin to understand the dynamics described herein. The government started Google, and they can trigger its replacement. Innovation offers a slight ray of hope, but the toxic IP environment “reforms” of the Obama administration have choked off most of the rebel forces’ tools in that area. Keep in mind, Apple alone has hundreds of billions of dollars in cash to use in suppressing any IP contenders that may emerge.
When we hear China has this power as a government — they are a ledgeropoly — it’s creepy. But China is a coffee klatch compared to the scale of the populations Google or Apple or Facebook or Twitter curate. Forget Sesame Credit — we’re talking about Chrome Credit. Facebook Bucks…
Either way, at this stage of power, something dramatic happens — the populace becomes subject to a 24/7 constant iterative mental feedback loop prescribed and exploited by the Ledgeropoly. And the populace, for the most part, has no idea how the manipulation is being “programmed.”
And the most important part of this is that when an enterprise reaches ledgeropoloy status, there is grave tendency for corrupt, insidious manipulation of what the people think. That corruption can be engineered for profit, or it can be tuned to project an ideology.
The result is the invisible and progressive marginalizing of any thought that the Ledgeropoly leaders don’t like. And the trending toward conformation among the unknowing screen-gazers. “Programming” as a concept takes on a new meaning. The clones begin to think, and look, alike. And they are ready for their next order.
The clones are not manipulated all at once or overnight. They are bent into compliance over the course of many thousands of “impressions,” posts, biased articles, and cyber social pressure rewards. Apple is the most overt in their projection of their CEO’s personal value system, but all the ledgeropolies implement their executives’ will.
And most importantly, the clones begin to think that their general agreement with each other is perfectly logical, even natural. It feels good. That’s because they all are indoctrinated with the same ideology, as optimized for their individual “starting point” profile. Sound like Nazi Germany in the late 1930's?
This dynamic warrants deep consideration for intervention by the U.S. government as a regulating body. Not in making subjective calls on things like InfoWars, which ends up as a nanny state, but rather in monitoring the supposed “algorithm” that is being applied to the minds of the people. Especially when the “algorithm” is a black box being written and executed from an unmarked building in a foreign country, where non-Americans and servers just do what they’re told.
The cyber state needs a supreme symmetry court of consequence.
It’s worth mentioning that it seems to us that against the backdrop of these emerging ledgeropolies, and the clones they create, in this environment of invisible, progressive programming, the digital extermination of InfoWars is sort of a good thing — because it is one hard data point that regular folks can observe to see how asymmetrical the Apple-Google-Facebook-Twitter-Spotify “algorithm” actually is. Score one for transparency. If only there were a structured societal mechanism to begin plotting these events and comparing on a scale of true symmetry.
Nevertheless, for now, we’re skeptical of the Silicon Valley ruling party’s ability to navigate these waters. They are showing signs of having a tin ear, or at least only allowing one color of keys to be played on the piano, so we’re setting sail for a new content community shore.
Ready for some irony? — this rejection of the clone state is what made Apple compelling so many years ago in a Super Bowl commercial…
We think there is a future beyond endlessly scrolling shallow posts and fragments of thought. We think buyer beware is a good idea — with a backstop red-line that is consistent. We want users to determine what they see, instead of being programmed by an invisible agenda implemented by a black box somewhere in Hyderabad. We hope to build an alternate space that thrives on creative media and authorship, with a deeper discourse and business potential. We have a strong community content threshold, but we will be enforcing it in a reasonable way — not with overlord convulsions and thought control in mind.
We are in pursuit of curated, powerful, rapid-access information, with productivity, knowledge, and fun in mind. And yes, it has a realistic red-line. And so it is — we say, “Welcome to MIXONIUM!”
Epilogue…
For those readers who may be too young to remember the old days, when Apple was anti-mind-control, here is the Super Bowl commercial they used to promote one of the early mac desktop machines. Soooooo ironic to see them rejecting the idea of clones and ideological overlords… Now, valued at over a trillion dollars, they are literally the big brother of 1984 that they warned us against.
