“In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”
”We don’t have much experience regulating the ownership of data, which is inherently a far more difficult task, because unlike land and machines, data is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, it can move at the speed of light, and you can create as many copies of it as you want. So we had better call upon our lawyers, politicians, philosophers and even poets to turn their attention to this conundrum: how do you regulate the ownership of data? This may well be the most important political question of our era. If we cannot answer this question soon, our sociopolitical system might collapse.”
21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Hariri
Imagine a superior life form were tasked with visiting Earth and writing a detailed summary of this planet. Yuval Noah Hariri’s three books, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century could be thought of as that report. He is incredibly learned and intelligent yes, but his uncanny clarity is what distinguishes him.
With PBLCSQ I am trying to publish a particular type of news coverage. It’s aggregated news from a variety of viewpoints. Most news outlets today publish fast news with a premium placed on the latest news. This is slow news with a premium placed on long term importance. This is curated news structured around major themes in an attempt to bring clarity. In addition to standard themes like United States, World, Business & Economy, Science & Health and Culture & Food they include:
Democracy Now
Climate change and the New Energy Economy
Artificial Intelligence
Biotech
Data Masters
Income Inequality
Social Justice and Human Rights
Migrations
Globalism and the Liberal Order
Nationalism
Localism - community groups, small businesses, unique cultures
The Authoritarians
Indian and China
The Global South
Georgia and Texas
The Forever War
The Superclass, non-democratic forums and elite failure
Democracy is first because the major challenges society faces have a commonality in the need for political solutions. So, the first order is to address the state of democracy. The consequences of using a simple technology like a hammer are easily understood. A lay person cannot build a more complex technology like an automobile but can still understand its uses and consequences. Even the engineers of artificial intelligence, big data and biotech cannot fully grasp the consequences of these technologies, and in some cases willfully ignore the problems they create. Because each of these, along with climate change, look to fundamentally change humanity and the planet they come next on the list. The other themes address powerful forces shaping the here and now and the future.
"Privacy to us is a human right. It's a civil liberty. It’s something that is unique to America, you know, this is like freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and privacy is right up there for us."
“The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer — if our customer was our product. We’ve elected not to do that.”
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple in an interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher
The Data Masters
Big Data is an incredibly powerful tool for good in the world but has dark sides. We like new tech. It drives the economy forward, creates wealth and jobs, it’s part of the American national story. It’s exciting and can be fun and super useful. Google is. Young people cannot imagine life without the internet. When Facebook and Twitter came along they opened up whole new ways of connecting people. Since these things were free they achieved mass adoption quickly. Not many people stopped to deeply consider the business model. And thus the surveillance economy was born. Some people are sanguine about giving up some privacy for useful, free services. But 2018 is not the end game. The internet is young. Data collection is increasing exponentially and being integrated with artificial intelligence. You don’t know where this ends up. I don’t know. No one knows.
President for Life/Spymaster Vladimir Putin has one idea. Asymmetrical warfare. Social media is a counter-intelligence wonderland. Really a fantasy come to life for the intelligence operative. If Allen Dulles and James Angleton had social media back in the 50’s they would have been overthrowing communist and socialist governments on the regular. The ability to create thousands of fake “people” that can interact with millions of real people pushing propaganda messages for political purposes is really mind boggling. Fake News has recently become a popular phrase but disinformation and propaganda have been essential parts of spy craft for millennia. Earlier this year on the now defunct but once great Global Politico podcast Senator Mark Warner was asked how we will look back on the 2016 Russian election meddling. He said we will see it as the beginning of the war. The United States spends close to $800 billion a year for military and intelligence operations to fight yesterday’s wars. However, only a tiny fraction of money and more importantly executive branch attention goes toward fighting an actual cyberwar that Russia has been fighting aggressively at least since Putin returned to the Presidency in 2012. Oh, and Mark Zuckerberg is the Supreme Allied Commander. He controls the battlefield.
Yes, it is known for multi-acre stores with giant parking lots, but Wal-Mart pioneered the data revolution in the 1970’s bringing ruthless efficiency to pricing, product selection, inventory control and supplier management. It is fundamentally a Big Data company. They won and Sears and K-Mart lost because of data mastery. The correlation between really big data and monopoly is strong. Wal-Mart is in many ways the prototype for tech giants Amazon, Google and Facebook. They all essentially mine big data to extract money from consumers. Traditional retailers merchandised their goods and media companies edited their publications. Today’s tech companies practice a purer form of capitalism. A relatively small number of headquarters employees write code and analyze data and turn that into profits. And when the robots are ready Wal-Mart and Amazon will jettison most of their employees.
Anti-trust law needs to be re-written and updated. Current U.S. anti-trust law is based on the principle that lower consumer prices reflect a healthy market. This extremely narrow view is having perverse effects. Wal-Mart and Amazon have low prices and that is good for consumers. But their ruthless, predatory growth has destroyed thousands of local, small businesses and strangled suppliers. By employing hundreds of thousands at low wages with poor benefits they have pushed down incomes, exacerbated income inequality and pushed burdens on government to pick up the slack with food stamps and other benefits. Google search has become almost as ubiquitous as running water and electricity. It’s parent company uses the monopoly profits it makes to subsidize all manner of new ventures and control over search gives the company many avenues for self dealing. Amazon in building its own big data empire learned how to do cutting edge cloud computing. It sells those services to others with the high margin, highly profitable subsidiary AWS. AWS profits allow the main retail arm of Amazon to operate at super low margins that other retailers cannot match and stay in business. Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms are “free” so great from current anti-trust perspective but they come with enormous non-monetary costs. Anti-trust law needs to consider consumer prices within a range of factors. How do giant companies effect a free, diverse, competitive market? Do they suppress worker wages and benefits? Have they become a monopoly buyer, aka monopsony, that crushes suppliers? Do they creat enormous problems for society, what economists call externalities, such as pollution that leads to climate change or a break down in the electoral system because of fake news and foreign government interference?
What would TR or FDR do with these new malefactors of great wealth? Our befuddled senators don’t seem to know. There are some obvious ideas. Use new anti-trust law to reduce the size of some tech giants if they are taking monopoly rents from one part of the organization to subsidize other parts. Split AWS off from Amazon and split Google search off from the rest of Alphabet. Facebook owning Instagram is like Coke owning Pepsi. It’s wrong. Regulate social media platforms as media outlets and make them liable for slander and libel. We need new competition for social media. But there are a lot of big, complex issues around data collection and social media. We need a national debate. It’s happening in the press and with some non-profits. But it needs to happen in the congress, in state houses, in the presidential election.
The big question is who owns data? Why do Google and Facebook get to monetize your data? Maybe they should compensate you by paying a user dividend. Or maybe they should be run like public utilities. #ownyourdata #userdividend #defunddemocracydestroyingtechbros
American social media and tech giants pose serious problems to society. Chinese tech can be down right scary. The Chinese government has direct influence and in some cases direct ownership of tech companies. With no philosophical or legal tradition of individual rights and thus limited conception of privacy China is an unfettered lab for social media and tech companies. Chinese tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent differ from their U.S. counterparts. American companies have largely siloed themselves to dominate specific categories. Amazon online retail, Apple hardware, Facebook social media, Google search, Netflix video. The play in other areas but being the clear leader in one category maximizes profits. Alibaba and Tencent are in some ways more ambitious than the American companies trying to compete in all major tech categories with a final goal of an all encompassing human/technology system. I guess it makes sense coming from a hybrid communist, capitalist, hierarchical, authoritarian society. Experts consider the lack of privacy a key advantage for Chinese companies in the race to dominate the artificial intelligence field. The Chinese government and corporations collect massive amounts of private data including biometric. A data set with a billion face scans or a billion vocal samples produces better recognition software than a data set of a million faces and voices. As much as there is to fear the run away power of American Big Tech, for those who believe in individual liberty Chinese Big Tech may pose an existential threat.
Welcome to the Panopticon. The Government will see you now. And forever.
Data Masters
Soothsayer in the Hills Sees Silicon Valley’s Sinister Side
New York Times, Maureen Dowd
Sean Parker unloads on Facebook: “God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains”
Axios, Mike Allen
the Guardian, Paul Lewis
Silicon Valley’s Keystone Problem: ‘A Monoculture of Thought’
New York Times, Farhad Manjoo
New Yorker, Evan Osnos
Osnos is a great journalist. If you have time you should read this long article. If you don’t have time, I can answer the question for you. Nope.
New Yorker, Louis Menand
New York Times, Natasha Singer
Twitter still awash in fake news, study finds
Politico, Jason Schwartz
Vox, Kaitlyn Tiffany
Amazon’s $15 Political Insurance Jeff Bezos gives his workers a raise—and asks the feds to raise costs for his competitors.
Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
National Review, Arthur L. Herman
Wall Street Journal, Rolf Winkler
Facebook Takes New Steps Against Bullying. Social-media platform enhances tools to help users avoid ‘unwanted, offensive’
Wall Street Journal, Micah Maidenberg
GOOGLE SUPPRESSES MEMO REVEALING PLANS TO CLOSELY TRACK SEARCH USERS IN CHINA
the Intercept, Ryan Gallager and Lee Fang
The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.
Bloomberg, Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley
Wall Street Journal, Li YYuan
Wall Street Journal, Yang Jie, Alyssa Abkowitz and Dan Strumpf
Alibaba and the Future of Business
Harvard Business Review, Ming Zeng
MIT Technology Review, Will Knight
Fortune, Adam Lashinsky
Social Justice
Vox, Umair Irfan
New York Times, Michelle Alexander
New York Times, Matthew Desmond
United States
National Affairs, Eli Lehrer
Bloomberg, Tyler Cowen
New York Times, David Leonhardt
Is a New Russian Meddling Tactic Hiding in Plain Sight?
New York Times, Kevin Roose
Georgia and Texas
Bloomberg, Cass Sunstein
World
Wall Street Journal, Gregg Ip
Why Tariff and Trade Disputes Are More Than a Money Problem
New York Times, Jeff Sommer
China Is Confronting New U.S. Hostility. But Is It Ready for the Fight?
New York Times, Jane Perlez
Wall Street Journal, Lingling Wei and Bob Davis
New York Times, Robert Kagan
Washington’s Farcical “Certifications” Enable the War Crimes of Allies
National Interest, Ted Galen Carpenter
Iranian Regime Change Advocates Are Licking Their Chops
National Interest, Curt Mills
Business & Economy
Wall Street Journal, Walter Russel Mead
Affordable housing is just the beginning of YIMBY
Vox, Matthew Yglesias
Science & Health
FDA Conducted Surprise Inspection of Juul’s Headquarters. Health officials say the visit was part of their efforts to combat surging youth use of e-cigarettes.
Wall Street Journal, Jennifer Maloney
Culture & Food
No Sex Please, We’re Apple: iPhone Giant Seeks TV Success on Its Own Terms. The tech giant wants to make scripted shows for streaming, only without violence, politics and risqué story lines.
Wall Street Journal, Tripp Mickle and Joe Flint
Anthony Bourdain vs. the Tyranny of Wellness
Quillette, Jenai Englehard