Quotulatiousness

January 12, 2021

“Big Tech” flexes the muscles and squeezes down the Overton Window online

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the FEE Daily newsletter, Brad Polumbo outlines the collusive mass deplatforming of President Trump and many of his high profile supporters:

Screencap of a Fox News report on the social media networks that have deplatformed President Donald Trump, January 2021.

Amid the fallout from the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, President Trump has been banned from just about every social media platform.

This crackdown is, frankly, unprecedented.

To be sure, social media and tech companies are private companies, and are not bound by the First Amendment. They have no legal obligation to host President Trump’s speech.

But there’s a question beyond can here that ranges into the should.

And I, for one, find it extremely disturbing that the elected President of the United States — who just weeks ago received roughly 75 million votes — is deemed beyond the pale of acceptable speech by Silicon Valley overlords who are overwhelmingly left-wing. Especially so given that these same platforms still allow the literal Chinese Communist Party to post pro-genocide propaganda and allow the members of the Iranian regime to openly foment violence.

The least consumers can demand is some consistency. Personally, I would find it much more reasonable for companies like Twitter to remove individual posts, including by President Trump, that violate rules — like fomenting violence — than to erase prominent political figures from the digital conversation entirely.

We should all want to see a free and open discourse online promoted by the companies we patronize. At the same time, none of this is cause for government control of the internet or meddling with the Section 230 liability shield.

If conservatives don’t like how Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey regulates content, they’d hate how Kamala Harris would do it.

October 18, 2020

Larry Correia on the danger in allowing Big Tech to decide what speech is and is not allowed to be heard

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The recent now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t over allegations that former Vice President Biden’s son used his father’s influence to gain vast sums of money are — ahem — unproven but persuasive. The frantic efforts of companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to keep those allegations out of the public eye get Larry Correia very angry:

If social media had banned Obama’s press secretary, and then stopped Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer from sharing articles from the New York Times, and then shut down the Obama campaign page nineteen days before his election against Mitt Romney, everyone would have lost their fucking minds. And rightfully so! Because that kind of blatant manipulation of information is evil.

If I put that into a thriller my editor would tell me it was too far fetched. Nobody would buy into such mustache twirling villainy, even if I was writing cyberpunk dystopia.

But Correia, they are private companies and you are usually against meddling in the affairs of private companies, you big hypocrite! Yeah, usually I am, but this is also something new, the likes of which mankind has never seen before, with these entities being the primary exchange of information for BILLIONS of people, so it’s kind of hard to put this thing which didn’t exist before into historical context. Facebook has no real competitors, and it has something like 2.7 billion regular users. With the flick of a switch it can stop a third of the Earth’s population from seeing whatever it doesn’t want them to see. Humanity has never had that before.

That’s real fucking power right there.

Now, unlike most people on the internet, I am not compelled to pretend to be a lawyer who just got my law degree from the University of Internet. Communications law is not my area, and I’m not going to be a Dunning-Krugerand talking about section 230 or whatever.

However, what I do know is that this is some seriously dangerous bullshit, and if we keep going down this road it is going to lead to some very bad ends. Freedom of speech functionally ceases to exist when both sides speak, but only one side is heard. If social media is a forum, then it needs to be an actual forum. If it is functionally a propaganda arm of the DNC, then so be it, but it can’t keep pretending to be something it’s not, while mindfucking the populace.

They are subpoenaing the Twitter CEO to come testify before congress but I expect that to be another utterly useless clown show where dummies ask dumb questions about something they don’t understand to some clever asshole who is just going to lie.

Like most liberty minded people, I have a reflexive dislike for government regulation of the free market. If the government can screw something up, it will. However I doubt I’ll feel that strongly about the sanctity of the free market as I’m being starved to death in a re-education gulag, after conservatives were stupid enough to let a tiny group of control freak statists have absolute power over the whole country’s speech and information.

What we’ve got right now with a handful of organizations having a monopoly over news and knowledge is stupid, getting stupider, and going to end extremely badly.

I don’t give a shit if you are liberal or conservative, the idea of some entity like Google determining what mankind is allowed to know or not know should terrify the shit out of you. Free speech becomes a meaningless concept if only approved speech is ever seen. And if you are cheering this shit on because right now it is helping your team score points against the other team, you are fool. Because once they have that power it is only a matter of time until one of your beliefs ends up on the naughty list too.

(note, that’s not an issue for Kool Aid drinking progs, because they don’t actually have any beliefs beyond GET POWER. It took them less than 24 hours to change “sexual preference” to a bad thing in the dictionary)

The only good thing about this situation is that even though Facebook and Twitter are trying to monopolize the flow of information, they are still bad at it. This week’s attempt at shutting down the New York Post‘s expose will probably go down as the biggest Streisand Effect in history. Their painfully obvious censorship will make far more people pay attention and lend credence to the report. Because after all, they wouldn’t try this hard to squish it, if there wasn’t some meat to it.

October 1, 2020

Far from being in trouble, Canadian film and TV investment has nearly doubled in the last 10 years

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian government — particularly Canadian Heritage minister Steven Guilbeault — is eager to pass legislation to “get money from the web giants” and their primary justification is the claim that Canadian TV and movie funding has been shrinking. As Michael Geist explains, that’s a pants-on-fire lie:

CMPA Profile – Financing, Sources: CMPA Profile 2019, 2016, 2013

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has said that his top legislative priority is to “get money from web giants.” While much of the attention has focused on his ill-advised plan to require Facebook to obtain licences for linking to news articles, his first legislative step is likely to target Internet streamers such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney with new requirements to fund Canadian content and to increase its “discoverability” by making it more prominent for subscribers. Based on his comments at several town halls, Guilbeault is likely to also create new incentives for supporting indigenous and persons of colour in the sector with a bonus for those investments (potentially treating $1 of investment as $1.50 for the purposes of meeting Cancon spending requirements). Much of the actual implementation will fall to the CRTC, which will be granted significant new regulatory powers and targeted with a policy direction.

Guilbeault’s case for establishing new mandated payments is premised on the claim that support for the film and television sector is declining due to the emergence of Internet streaming services, which have resulted in decreased revenues for the conventional broadcast sector and therefore lower contributions to Cancon creation. In fact, Guilbeault recently told Le Devoir that without taking action there would be a billion dollar deficit in support in the next three years. He says that his objective is to actually generate a few hundred million more per year in local production by the Internet streamers. In other words, he’s expecting roughly $2 billion in new investment over three years in Cancon from U.S. entities due to his planned regulations (moving from a billion dollar deficit to a billion dollars in extra spending).

While Guilbeault frames these regulatory requirements as a matter of fairness and “rebalancing”, industry data over the past decade tell a much different story. Indeed, there has been record setting film and television production in recent years, much of it supported by companies such as Netflix. CRTC chair Ian Scott last year said that Netflix is “probably the biggest single contributor to the [Canadian] production sector today.” While that is not entirely true – the data suggests that Canadian taxpayers are the biggest contributor with federal and provincial tax credits consistently the largest source of financing – the claim that there is a billion dollar deficit coming or that foreign streamers do not contribute to film and television production in Canada without a regulatory requirement is simply false.

December 16, 2019

“The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States”

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jason Morgan reviews Michael Rectenwald’s new book Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom:

The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States. The monoculture of virtue signaling and high- and heavy-handed woke corporate leftism at places like Google, Twitter, and Facebook was once a source of chagrin for those who found themselves shut out of various internet sites for deviating from the orthodoxies of the Palo Alto elites. After the 2016 presidential election, however, it became obvious that the digitalistas were doing a lot more than just making examples of a few handpicked “extremists.” From the shadow banning of non-leftist sites and views to full-complement political propagandizing, Bay Area leftists have been so aggressive in bending the national psyche to their will that there is talk in the papers and on the cable “news” channels of “existential threats to our democracy.”

It is tempting to see this as a function of political correctness. Americans, and others around the world, who have found themselves on the “wrong side of history” (as determined by the cultural elite in an endless cycle of epistemological door closing) have long been shut out of conversations, their views deemed beyond the pale of acceptable discourse in enlightened modern societies. Google, Facebook, Twitter — are these corporations, and their uber-woke CEOs, just cranking the PC up to eleven and imposing their schoolmarmish proclivities on the billions of people who want to scrawl messages on their electronic chalkboards?

Not so, says reformed leftist — and current PC target — Michael Rectenwald. The truth of Stanford and Harvard alumni’s death grip on global discourse is much more complicated than just PC run amok. It is not that the Silicon Valley giants are agents of mass surveillance and censorship (although mass surveillance and censorship are precisely the business they’re in). It’s that the very system they have designed is, structurally, the same as the systems of oppression that blanketed and smothered free expression in so much of the world during the previous century. In his latest book, Google Archipelago, Rectenwald outlines how this system works, why leftism is synonymous with oppression, and how the Google Archipelago’s regime of “simulated reality” “must be countered, not only with real knowledge, but with a metaphysics of truth.”

Google Archipelago is divided into eight chapters and is rooted in both Rectenwald’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history of science and corporate control of culture, as well as in his own experiences. Before retiring, Rectenwald had been a professor at New York University, where he was thoroughly entrenched in the PC episteme that squelches real thought at universities across North America and beyond. Gradually, Rectenwald began to realize that PC was not a philosophy, but the enemy of open inquiry. For this reason, and because Rectenwald is an expert in the so-called digital humanities and the long history of scientific (and pseudo-scientific) thinking that feeds into it, Google Archipelago is not just a dry monograph about a social issue. By turns memoir, Kafkaesque dream sequence, trenchant rebuke of leftist censorship, and intellectual history of woke corporate political correctness, Google Archipelago is a welcoming window into a mind working happily in overdrive.

November 29, 2019

QotD: The progressive belief in the mind-controlling power of the press (and Facebook)

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s a piece of graffiti that sums up the woke left’s view of ordinary people. It says: “When the British working class stop reading right-wing news, we will see progressive change.” There it is. In black and white. Scrawled on a wall somewhere but frequently shared on social media by supposed progressives. One sentence that captures why so many modern left-wingers, and in particular the Corbynistas, are so obsessed with the press – because they think it has hypnotised the fickle masses and polluted the plebs’ brains with horrible right-wing ideas. Make no mistake: when the left rages against the media, it is really raging against the masses.

Media-bashing has resurfaced with a vengeance over the past couple of weeks. It isn’t hard to see why. The polls don’t look good for Labour. Some are predicting a wipeout, especially in Labour’s traditional working-class strongholds. And as has been the case for a good 30 years now, when political events don’t go the left’s way – or rather, when the dim public lets the left down – the knives come out for the media.

Corbynista commentators are railing against the “billionaire media”. “Billionaires control the media, and it’s undermining democracy”, say the middle-class left-wingers of Novara Media. How? Because these billionaires are “tell[ing] you what to think”. You, the gullible, ill-educated throng, that is; not us, the well-educated, PhD-owning media leftists at Novara who can see through the lies peddled by evil billionaires.

Brendan O’Neill, “The woke elitism behind the left’s media-bashing”, Spiked, 2019-11-25.

July 8, 2019

Bitcoin and its successors lack one thing that Libra has

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Coyne on cryptocurrencies:

Sign of the times: the convenience store in my block of mid-town Toronto has installed, in addition to the usual fare of milk, cigarettes and magazines, an ATM dispensing bitcoins. Customers insert their debit cards and buy bitcoin, which they can then use to … to …

To do what, exactly, that they could not do with regular money? Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency — there are now dozens of competitors — has always struck me as a solution in search of a problem. Its chief selling point, the anonymity made possible by its system of ultra-encrypted peer-to-peer transactions, unmediated by the banking system and beyond reach of the regulators, would seem of most appeal to two groups: crooks and cranks.

Oh, and a third: speculators. The price of cryptocurrencies has tended to fluctuate wildly — having fallen to a third of its peak against the U.S. dollar last year, Bitcoin has tripled in value so far in 2019. Cryptocurrencies are unlikely to achieve widespread use as mediums of exchange so long as they fail to fulfil one of money’s other primary functions, as stores of value.

The Wild West reputation the privately issued currencies have acquired — one of the most popular, Dogecoin, was invented by a 26-year-old Australian in 2013 as a joke — will be one of the early hurdles confronting Facebook’s recent entry into the field. The company hopes its 2.4 billion users will soon be buying goods and services from each other with Libra, as the proposed digital currency is called, wherever on earth either party may happen to be.

And yet Libra differs from Bitcoin and its ilk in several important ways. One, while it makes use of the same blockchain encryption technology as Bitcoin to ensure the security of payments, it is not based on the same anarchic premise.

In contrast to Bitcoin’s unsupervised, massively distributed, “permissionless” network, Libra will operate, at least initially, via Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp platforms, which are very much subject to its control. The company, and the others it has recruited as partners — names like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal — are likewise highly visible targets of regulatory oversight, and indeed have signalled they intend to work with national banking regulators.

June 26, 2019

Social media giants can be publisher or platform, but not both

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Ace explains why Facebook, Google, and the other social media companies have been playing fast and loose with the rules, sometimes using the rules that apply to publishers and sometimes the ones that apply to platforms, depending on their whim:

Only a speaker or publisher of claimed defamatory content can be sued.

Not being a speaker or publisher of a defamatory statement gives you total immunity from suit. You’re just a guy, you had nothing to do with the tort alleged.

Section 230 [of the Community Decency Act] specifically says that “neutral content platforms” shall not be deemed to be the “speaker or publisher” of a claimed defamatory statement made by a third party using their service — hence, the complete immunity from suit. You can’t be sued for something someone else said, obviously.

Now newspapers can be sued for the defamatory remarks of, say, an interview subject. They are publishers of that defamatory statement — they chose to publish it. The interview subject made the statement, but then they chose to publish it themselves, becoming another “speaker” of the defamation.

Now, “neutral content platforms” are never considered “speakers” of third-party defamations (or any third-party crime involving speech, such as offering to sell contraband or conspiring to commit a crime). But a newspaper or media company — or this blog — could be.

The corporate cucks claim that you cannot put restrictions on Google, Facebook, or Twitter as regards their right to censor opinions they disagree with because that constitutes “compelled speech.” You’re compelling them to speak things they do not believe, the cucks’ argument goes.

But… section 230 states that, as a legal matter, they are not considered the “speakers” of any statement made on their “neutral content platforms.”

So which is it? Are they the speakers of these words — in which case, like a newspaper or tv station, they’d have every right to exercise editorial judgment and decide what they wish their company to say — or are they not the speakers of these words, which is their claim whenever someone tries to sue them?

As it stands, they are speakers when it comes to their power to block people from speaking on their platforms — and thus can indulge in the vice of censorship — but not speakers when it comes to people suing them for what other people said on their platforms.

Choose one or the other: Either you are a speaker of other people’s words or you’re not. You can’t forever choose one and then the other when it’s in your interest to have the Clown Nose On or the Clown Nose Off.

June 23, 2019

They managed to get 7% approval? That’s surprising

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael van der Galien reports on a recent poll of registered voters in the United States that will not be happy reading for many social media companies:

Only seven percent are happy with social media companies being able to harvest and sell data without permission or compensation.
Chart from Hill.TV – https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/449576-poll-voters-overwhelmingly-want-more-regulations-on-personal

Thirty-six percent of those polled say there is no scenario imaginable to them in which it’s OK for companies to collect and sell such information. Read that again: one-third of those asked always oppose companies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google collecting and selling such data. Another 36% said they can support the collection and selling of personal data if the individuals involved are compensated for it.

Only 21% say they believe companies should be able to collect and sell personal information of users if they’ve expressly asked for permission. As for selling and collecting it without permission:

    Eight percent of Republicans and also Democratic respondents said that firms should be allowed to sell information without permission. Seven percent of independents agreed.

In other words, this is a bipartisan issue, which makes perfect sense. After all, this issue affects all of us, whether we are conservative or liberal.

Matthew Sheffield has more for Hill.TV:

On Monday, the Washington Post reported that the Federal Trade Commission has been investigating Google’s YouTube division for tracking child users, a practice allegedly in violation of a 1998 law which forbids tracking and targeting children under 13 years of age.

The poll found broad bipartisan agreement on what companies should be allowed to do with consumer data. Eight percent of Republicans and also Democratic respondents said that firms should be allowed to sell information without permission. Seven percent of independents agreed.

About the same number of Democrats and Republicans said that companies should not be able to sell data under any circumstance. Thirty-three percent of GOP respondents took this position, as did 35 percent of Democrats. Forty percent of independents agreed.

Younger voters were more willing to allow companies to sell consumer data than older ones although it was still a minority position. Fourteen percent of respondents who were between 18 and 34 said they supported letting companies compile and sell personal data without permission while only 2 percent of those 65 and above agreed.

May 8, 2019

QotD: Those “my-kid-was-almost-sex-trafficked” hoaxes

Filed under: Law, Media, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Perhaps you’re wondering why someone would make up such a preposterous story. I have an idea.

For the last few years, there has been a string of moms going on Facebook, breathlessly claiming that they were out at the mall (or Ikea, or Target), when suddenly they realized that they were being stalked by a kidnapper clearly planning to snatch their kids and sex-traffic them.

The evidence is usually something like, “I saw a guy staring at my baby.” Or, “I saw the couple in one aisle and then I went down a different aisle and there they were again,” or, “I looked outside and there was a van with its door open!”

Inevitably, the mom congratulates herself on having had the wherewithal to figure out what was going on just in time, and bravely thwart the heinous crime by, uh, staring the guys down. Then the mom usually says something like, “if it happened to me it could happen to you,” without reminding readers that in fact, nothing happened. No one grabbed a kid. No one was sex-trafficked. (The head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, David Finkelhor, says he knows of zero cases of a child kidnapped from a parent in public and sex trafficked.) It’s all in the moms’ heads.

Yet they get thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of approving shares and comments on social media.

Here’s one story. Here’s another, and another, and another. Here’s one that went mega-viral a few years back. You get the idea. It’s a panic, with a twist: adulation.

The mom ends up the hero of the non-event, basking in comments like thank you for sharing this, and so glad you are safe and, you are such a strong, conscientious mama.

If only this hoax story could go as viral as the my-kid-was-almost-sex-trafficked posts.

Lenore Skenazy, “Mom Charged With Falsely Accusing a Man of Trying to Kidnap Her 5-Year-Old at the Mall”, Reason, 2019-07-04.

May 4, 2019

Canadian privacy laws

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist asks whether it matters that Canadian privacy laws provide more privacy protection if they can’t actually be enforced:

It has long been an article of faith among privacy watchers that Canada features better privacy protection than the United States. While the U.S. relies on binding enforcement of privacy policies alongside limited sector-specific rules for children and video rentals, Canada’s private sector privacy law (PIPEDA or the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act), which applies broadly to all commercial activities, has received the European Union’s stamp of approval, and has a privacy commissioner charged with investigating complaints.

Despite its strength on paper, my Globe and Mail op-ed notes the Canadian approach emphasizes rules over enforcement, which runs the risk of leaving the public woefully unprotected. PIPEDA establishes requirements to obtain consent for the collection, use and disclosure of personal information, but leaves the Privacy Commissioner of Canada with limited tools to actually enforce the law. In fact, the not-so-secret shortcoming of Canadian law is that the federal commissioner cannot order anyone to do much of anything. Instead, the office is limited to issuing non-binding findings and racing to the federal court if an organization refuses to comply with its recommendations.

The weakness of Canadian law became evident last week when the federal and British Columbia privacy commissioners released the results of their investigation into Facebook arising from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The report details serious privacy violations and includes several recommendations for reform, including new measures to ensure “valid and meaningful consent”, greater transparency for users, and oversight by a third-party monitor for five years.

Facebook’s response? No thanks. The social media giant started by disputing whether the privacy commissioner even had jurisdiction over the matter. After a brief negotiation, the company simply refused to adopt the commissioners’ recommendations. As their report notes “Facebook disagreed with our findings and proposed alternative commitments, which reflected material amendments to our recommendations, in certain instances, altering the very nature of the recommendations themselves, undermining the objectives of our proposed remedies, or outright rejecting the proposed remedy.”

April 4, 2019

Of course Facebook is now in favour of government regulation … it’ll keep out their competition

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The recent calls for the government to regulate social media got support from Mark Zuckerberg, which seems to have surprised some in the media. It’s not at all uncommon for established firms to not only welcome government oversight but to actively support it — because it’s a highly effective strategy to strangle smaller competitors and keep new competitors from entering the field:

On Saturday, Mark Zuckerberg appealed to the government for increased regulation of the internet including his company Facebook. According to Zuckerberg, increased government action is needed to protect society from harmful content, ensure election integrity, protect people’s privacy, and to guarantee data portability. If enacted, the government would possess a wide range of control over internet businesses. For Zuckerberg, this is for the public’s best interest.

But make no mistake about it, Zuckerberg’s cries for regulation is not an appeal to his humanitarianism. On the other hand, it solves glaring issues that Facebook has faced since the 2016 election.

[…]

With increased government oversight, Facebook’s leadership will finally be able to pass the buck to someone else. The government will provide them with a clear set of rules that they will be accountable for. Any negative press coverage that occurs outside of those guidelines, will not be attributable to their company but to the rule-making body of the government. This will allow Facebook’s leadership to regain credibility within a clearly definable framework that they are not responsible for creating.

But perhaps Zuckerberg’s appeal for regulation is even more cunning. Government regulation will undoubtedly be met with higher costs. Internet companies will have to spend more on staffing to be in compliance with the increased burdens implemented by the rule-making body. We saw this play out in the banking industry after the Great Recession. A study conducted last year found that since 2009, banks have been fined a total of $345 billion dollars in penalties and noncompliance costs. Further, another study found that in 2016 banks spent $100 billion dollars on regulatory compliance alone.

Large internet companies like Facebook and Google will easily absorb the strain of increased regulatory costs. It is the smaller businesses that will feel the financial squeeze. With increased regulatory compliance spending, smaller startups will face an even bigger hill to climb to compete with the likes of Facebook.

Another “feature” of government regulation is what is known as “regulatory capture”, as the regulating body and the regulated organizations, after an initial period of ostentatious “conflict”, settle down into a cosy symbiotic relationship … in only a few years, many of the regulatory staff will find themselves working for one of the regulated organizations, and vice-versa. The regulatory body will — like all bureaucracies — start to care more about keeping itself alive and growing than about the original reason it was set up. Small organizations will stall or go extinct, and only the existing dinosaurs will carry on, protected from competition by their regulator’s powers.

March 3, 2019

QotD: Four ways to corporate monopoly

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

1. Proprietary technology. This one is straightforward. If you invent the best technology, and then you patent it, nobody else can compete with you. Thiel provocatively says that your technology must be 10x better than anyone else’s to have a chance of working. If you’re only twice as good, you’re still competing. You may have a slight competitive advantage, but you’re still competing and your life will be nasty and brutish and so on just like every other company’s. Nobody has any memory of whether Lycos’ search engine was a little better than AltaVista’s or vice versa; everybody remembers that Google’s search engine was orders of magnitude above either. Lycos and AltaVista competed; Google took over the space and became a monopoly.

2. Network effects. Immortalized by Facebook. It doesn’t matter if someone invents a social network with more features than Facebook. Facebook will be better than their just by having all your friends on it. Network effects are hard because no business will have them when it first starts. Thiel answers that businesses should aim to be monopolies from the very beginning – they should start by monopolizing a tiny market, then moving up. Facebook started by monopolizing the pool of Harvard students. Then it scaled up to the pool of all college students. Now it’s scaled up to the whole world, and everyone suspects Zuckerberg has somebody working on ansible technology so he can monopolize the Virgo Supercluster. Similarly, Amazon started out as a bookstore, gained a near-monopoly on books, and used all of the money and infrastructure and distribution it won from that effort to feed its effort to monopolize everything else. Thiel describes how his own company PayPal identified eBay power sellers as its first market, became indispensible in that tiny pool, and spread from there.

3. Economies of scale. Also pretty straightforward, and especially obvious for software companies. Since the marginal cost of a unit of software is near-zero, your cost per unit is the cost of building the software divided by the number of customers. If you have twice as many customers as your nearest competitor, you can charge half as much money (or make twice as much profit), and so keep gathering more customers in a virtuous cycle.

4. Branding. Apple is famous enough that it can charge more for its phones than Amalgamated Cell Phones Inc, even for comparable products. Partly this is because non-experts don’t know how to compare cell phones, and might not trust Consumer Reports style evaluations; Apple’s reputation is an unfakeable sign that their products are pretty good. And partly it’s just people paying extra for the right to say “I have an iPhone, so I’m cooler than you”. Another company that wants Apple’s reputation would need years of successful advertising and immense good luck, so Apple’s brand separates it from the competition and from the economic state of nature.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Zero to One”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-01-31.

August 13, 2018

QotD: The new Wobblies

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I live in two worlds. One has www in front of it. I must admit I don’t like the imaginary place that’s become the ironclad version of reality for most people. The jackanapes who rule the Friendface planet are the worst people extant, if you ask me. By the way, if you’re reading this, you asked me.

I don’t like the invertebrates who run the Intertunnel. I’ve decided they need a name. Let’s coin the term right here and now: The Wobblies. The Website Wankers of the World have united into a Voltron of suck, and they rule this alternate ecosystem that’s taken over the real world. They don’t care if anything productive happens in the brave new world they’ve created. As long as they lord over the nonproduction, of course.

Sippican, “Minor Swing by Minors”, Sippican Cottage, 2016-11-05.

August 9, 2018

“… here’s your nut graf – this is about Facebook death”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Are you on Facebook? Or perhaps it’s more proper to ask “are you still on Facebook?” J.D. Jagiello used to be:

To Whom It May Concern:

I was already tired of your rants about food, bad-hair days, roommates, feeling too many feelings, the public transit, lost IKEA tools, TV shows, wives, husbands and children and, above all, Trump (that’s like ranting about having an asshole—we all have it). I was tired of your quirky disregard of punctuation and how it’s for the olds. Guys you don’t need it to understand what I’m trying to say, so here’s your nut graf – this is about Facebook death.

I was tired of the quizzes: What Kind of Pizza Are You?

And the Inspirational Quotes. “It’s during our darkest hours we must focus on the light” (—Aristotle, supposedly). Here’s mine: “There’s no better time than now to delete.” (Position this one against a background of a man in canoe swimming away to a proxy of freedom.)

Shares about yoga, running, god? Ugh.

“Funny” kid dialogues: no. (But I’ve done it myself, yeah.)

I read your high-brow discussions about postmodernism or grammar, out of my leftover Good-For-You homework sense of obligation. I didn’t go to the right schools to be able to join in and I don’t retain information easily. I rarely felt philistine-aggressive about it; I accepted that I didn’t have the membership.

On a positive note, I always looked at your baby pictures because I like babies. I will miss the baby pictures. I won’t miss twice-a-week updates on some of those babies.

I also never got sick of memes or videos of animals, or articles about octopuses or archaeological digs or stupid but cleverly funny reviews of your mundane experiences on the bus or your convos with grandma. On a serious note: I am also passionate about health policies, and Indigenous issues in my country and have a lot of educated friends who post about it — stuff that doesn’t even make it to mainstream media — so I liked to get my information that way.

I used to post status updates on Facebook that many people found interesting or funny, and sometimes I shared opinions, and it was a good place to feel socially connected during times of isolation (a new baby, illness). But about two years ago or so, I stopped posting about anything serious, though I still asked for recommendations, innocent stuff. Occasionally—an old reflex—I would post something of more substance but then delete quickly because Facebook became the place of who knows who is watching.

I’ve tapered off my Facebook activities over the last few months. I check my feed at most once per day, and I find myself scrolling quickly past “the same old stuff”. I occasionally leave comments on some of my friends’ posts, but for the most part, I’m not getting into conversations — especially on anything faintly political — and I don’t much miss it. I stopped automatically posting links to my blog earlier this year … and only a couple of people seem to have noticed. That tracks well with my blog statistics which show very little of my traffic comes from Facebook and that number didn’t drop very far after I stopped posting links. I still use a plugin to auto-Tweet my blog posts, but outside a few Vikings fan groups, I’ve never really been interested in conversations on that platform.

Facebook’s algorithms seem to have noticed my slow disengagement, as I’m now getting reminders and notifications when friends post much more often than I remember in the past. I’m even getting the odd “Friend A responded to Friend B’s post” stuff, which is certainly a new attempt to entice me to log in again.

July 4, 2018

It’s never a good idea to expand the power of the state

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Francis Porretto on the problem of giving the state yet another tool for its already overflowing toolbox:

    The party in power is smug and arrogant. The party out of power is insane.” – Megan McArdle, a.k.a. “Jane Galt”

Among the older maxims of politics is to beware handing the State a new power without first reflecting on how your opponents could use it against you. For as sure as the Sun rises in the East, your opponents will return to dominance someday, and whatever powers you awarded the State will be in their hands.

Just now, the focus is on President Trump’s choice of a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. The Democrats are tearing their collective hair out over this, as now that the filibuster is a dead letter for judicial appointees, their minority status in the Senate leaves them no way to block his selection. Yet it was Senate Democrats during the Obama Administration who first attacked the filibuster – when they were in the majority and sought to confirm Obama appointees. Coulda told ‘em then, but they weren’t in a mood to listen.

Today’s critical battles are over freedom of expression and “deplatforming.”

Some folks of sound mind and generally good will are exercised about how Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Twitter regulate their immensely popular social-media platforms to disfavor conservatives. The complaints have been many, and a great many of them are both accurate (i.e., the things complained about really happened) and valid (i.e., only persons of conservative or libertarian bent were silenced). However, they come up against a barrier that’s proved impassable to date: the right of private property.

So a lot of those folks have embraced the notion that those platforms could be regulated by the federal government as public accommodations. That’s the conception under which the Civil Rights Acts were deemed to hold legitimate authority over restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and other nominally private properties. If you present your facility as “open to the public,” the logic runs, then you can be forbidden to discriminate – i.e., to provide your services to some members of the “public” but not others.

(For those who remember the “nationwide Bell System,” the phrase common carrier might rise to mind. The concept is essentially the same, as was the federal government’s assertion of authority over it. However, in that particular case, the rationale was that the Bell System was a monopoly, protected by that same federal government. Telecom deregulation and the breakup of the Bell System put paid to that scheme, thank God.)

Those in the Right who favor this notion are asking for trouble. Someday the balance of power will shift leftward once again. What would the Democrats – an increasingly totalitarian bunch who’ve never seen a law, a regulation, or a tax it didn’t love – do with the precedent that an Internet platform can be regulated as a public accommodation, despite being private property?

H/T to Bill St. Clair for the link.

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