Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Elections aren’t won by handwringing, cowering, and/or bashing your own candidates.

The revolution will be supervised.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

The willow is too close to the house.

Found liable for massive fraud, is required to post a massive bond, gets a break, then files a *fraudulent* bond!

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Every day Vance writes another chapter in the book called “Worst VP Pick Ever”.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

I was promised a recession.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Tech Oligarchs Pick a Side

Tech Oligarchs Pick a Side

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This post is in: , ,

And it ain’t ours. From The Wall Street Journal:

Meta Platforms will let political ads on Facebook and Instagram question the legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, one of several changes the social-media company and other platforms have made to loosen constraints on campaign advertising for 2024.

Meta made the change last year, but it hasn’t gained wide attention. The company decided to allow political advertisers to say past elections were “rigged” or “stolen” but prevented them from questioning the legitimacy of ongoing and coming elections.

Executives at Meta made the decision based on free-speech considerations after weighing past U.S. elections in which the results might have been contested by a portion of the electorate, according to people familiar with the issue.

The explanation in the third paragraph is horseshit. Meta’s owner saw Twitter’s purchaser abandon any pretense of responsible content moderation (and personally amplify Nazi content) without facing any regulatory blowback and decided they could too. People with sovereign piles of cash aren’t especially worried about consequences.

Relatedly, Maria at Crooked Timber published an essay today called “Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder.” It’s worth a read, and the diagnosis in the title is 100% correct.

A dozen or so years ago, one of the Valley’s personality disordered famously pointed out that software is eating the world. It will gobble up democracy too if we let it.

Open thread.

Reader Interactions

111Comments

  1. 1.

    BruceFromOhio

    Meta’s owner saw Twitter’s purchaser abandon any pretense of responsible content moderation (and personally amplify Nazi content) without facing any regulatory blowback and decided they could too.

    Meta’s owner missed the next chapter, where the value of said platform went down. A LOT.

    You want to let the fascists spraypaint the place with blatant lies, great. It’s gonna cost you.

  2. 2.

    Bill Arnold

    Open thread, was watching a video of James Comer say “You look like a smurf here”. Always check Urban Dictionary, bold mine. I suspect Comer didn’t mean either of these, but they are amusing:

    smurf
    In online gaming, a smurf is an experienced player who uses a new account to deceive other players into thinking he’s a noob (newbie). The purpose is usually to play against less skilled opponents who will under-estimate the ‘smurf’. The expected result is that the smurf will pwn (dominate) his opponents and humiliate them further as they have been now beaten by an apparent noob.

    smurf
    In banking, smurfing refers to splitting of a large financial transaction into multiple smaller transactions, each of which is below a minimum limit (such as $10,000) above which banks must report any financial transaction, precisely for the purpose of evading scrutiny by regulators or law enforcement. Someone who smurfs is a smurf in this context.

  3. 3.

    RaflW

    Confiscatory MFing tax rates.

    That’s really all I have to say any more. These parasitic billionaires are going to destroy everything, goddamit.

  6. 6.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @BruceFromOhio:

    the value of said platform went down. A LOT.

    Yeah.  I saw an article with calculations from companies who evaluate this stuff.  Twitter is very slowly bleeding accounts, steadily bleeding traffic, and bleeding income and advertisers like a damn fire hose.  Musk is propping it up with his own money.  A lot of his own money.

  7. 7.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    There is a solution to this, and its basically punishing lawsuits. That hasn’t been something our side has geared up to do, but the only way to motivate them to do real content moderation is to cost them a lot of money… more money than their bad behavior is making.

  8. 8.

    Tenar Arha

    BlueSky has given me a bunch of invites, and the ones I’ve offered them to went meh.

    Any way, anyone want 1 of these 4, reply below and we’ll arrange it somehow.

  9. 9.

    Dangerman

    @RaflW: Confiscatory MFing tax rates.

    Exactly. With a twist; I’m a fair person, they can have a choice:

    a) Confiscatory MFing tax rates

    b) Tumbril Express Lane

  11. 11.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @MattF: My eye flickered to what I thought said “Batman,” then I read “$am Bankman-Fried.” Imagine my disappointment.

    Then, I said again, the article sounds interesting. Into my surprisingly large pile of unresolved tabs it goes.

  13. 13.

    MattF

    @Tenar Arha: Speaking of BlueSky invites, a good source is James Fallows on Xitter. He’s on BlueSky and solicits invites from members, then offers the invites on Xitter to anyone who emails him with a request— it’s how I got on. He posts when he has a supply, so if you follow him you find out when they are available.

  16. 16.

    trollhattan

    Related, here’s a deep dive on how Facebook availed themselves to the 1-6 plotters. Small excerpt.

    Although Facebook had vaguely alleged that it had taken down the group because of prohibited content, the truth was that the group hadn’t violated Facebook’s rules against incitement to violence, and the platform had no policy forbidding false claims of election fraud. Based on the group’s obvious malignancy, however, Facebook’s Content Policy team had declared a “spirit of the policy” violation, a rare but not unheard-of designation that boiled down to “because we say so.”

    Zuckerberg had accepted the deletion under emergency circumstances, but he didn’t want the Stop the Steal group’s removal to become a precedent for a backdoor ban on false election claims. During the run-up to Election Day, Facebook had removed only lies about the actual voting process—stuff like “Democrats vote on Wednesday” and “People with outstanding parking tickets can’t go to the polls.” Noting the thin distinction between the claim that votes wouldn’t be counted and that they wouldn’t be counted accurately, Samidh Chakrabarti, the head of Facebook’s civic-integrity team, had pushed to take at least some action against baseless election fraud claims.

    Civic hadn’t won that fight, but with the Stop the Steal group spawning dozens of similarly named copycats—some of which also accrued six-figure memberships—the threat of further organized election delegitimization efforts was obvious.

    Barred from shutting down the new entities, Civic assigned staff to at least study them. Staff also began tracking top delegitimization posts, which were earning tens of millions of views, for what one document described as “situational awareness.” A later analysis found that as much as 70 percent of Stop the Steal content was coming from known “low news ecosystem quality” pages, the commercially driven publishers that Facebook’s News Feed integrity staffers had been trying to fight for years.

    Civic had prominent allies in this push for intelligence gathering about these groups, if not for their outright removal. Facebook had officially banned QAnon conspiracy networks and militia groups earlier in the year, and Brian Fishman, Facebook’s counterterrorism chief, pointed to data showing that Stop the Steal was being heavily driven by the same users enthralled by fantasies of violent insurrection.

    “They stood up next to folks that we knew had a track record of violence,” Fishman later explained of Stop the Steal.

    But Zuckerberg overruled both Facebook’s Civic team and its head of counterterrorism. Shortly after the Associated Press called the presidential election for Joe Biden on November 7—the traditional marker for the race being definitively over—Facebook staff lawyer Molly Cutler assembled roughly 15 executives that had been responsible for the company’s election preparation. Citing orders from Zuckerberg, she said the election delegitimization monitoring was to immediately stop.

  17. 17.

    Bill Arnold

    Maria at Crooked Timber published an essay today called “Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder.”

    That is a very good essay. The first paragraph in the first three sections is a summary, so:

    1. Ideology
    Silicon Valley’s ideology is this: Libertarianism for me. Feudalism for thee.
    2. Personality disorder
    Silicon Valley’s most famous funders and CEOs veer strongly into sociopathy, narcissism, and abiding Daddy issues. They are thin-skinned, vicious, gormless. Now middle-aged men, their emotional development ended when they made their first hundred million.
    3. Silence of the Sensibles
    Individually, the Silicon Valley brats are nothing special. I’ve worked in tech for over two decades, and each arbitrarily made billionaire is as interchangeable an extrusion of post-war, northern Californian high-tech capitalism as was each identical food delivery app it produced. Brats will be brats, and capital is always gonna capital, but it’s the legions of merely moderately powerful enablers who maintain the tech billionaires’ status and ensure their untouchability.
    4. We are all very, very tired.
    I, quite frankly, am tired. I find myself yet again in a conversation dominated by beneficiaries of a dirty system while the conscience, critique and force of collective action for alternatives are provided by women, and women of colour, predominantly.

  18. 18.

    The Kropenhagen Interpretation

    @Frankensteinbeck: I use a spare account I keep for guests to smurf on one of my favorite games sometimes. When smurfing is rife on the game, the practice leads to some surprisingly appropriate matchups, perhaps better than the game had been doing itself beforehand.

    But, yes, it also leads to legitimate dunking on middling players. Instances of myself being dunked upon are also virtually eliminated, unfair but not so very unwelcome. I only bring it out when called upon.

  19. 19.

    piratedan

    @MattF: both Adam and myself also have some bluesky invites if anyone has a need.  Willing to share with any jackals that desire to engage over there.

  20. 20.

    Hoodie

    @Frankensteinbeck: And a lot of other people’s money.   You have to understand that Musk will never really be at risk because he’s so insanely wealthy.    He seems to have made the inevitable transition from wanting to make things to wanting to acquire power, as the insanely wealthy usually come to the realization that wealth isn’t enough.  In and of itself, that’s not a bad thing; some wealthy people realize they need to give back to the societies that made them wealthy, e.g., they devote themselves to philanthropy, etc.  That can be problematic in implementation, but still represents a positive impulse.    With a sociopath like Musk, however, it’s destructive because the thing he’s doing (fucking up Twitter) is a social negative.  He’s not only putting his own fortune at risk in doing this, he’s threatening the stability of markets that are distorted by the over valuation of Tesla.  He’ll be ok if it craters; a lot of others won’t.   Meanwhile, Tesla is not doing shit, its vehicles are dated and the CyberTruck is the automotive equivalent of yanking to National Geographic.  It’s not even sexy to counterbalance its impracticality.

  21. 21.

    RaflW

    I just noticed yesterday that I have three Bluesky invites. I’d really like Bluesky to gain some more momentum. It’s decent so far. I tried mastodon and it just never held my interest. Bsky is a bit more fun and irreverent, while also bringing me some news I’d otherwise not have seen.

    I’d also be interested in a handle exchange so we can get more BJers connected (I’m @raflw.bsky.social as one might expect). Not to be all demanding, but hey FPers, maybe a Bluesky invites & handles thread some time when the news is not flyin’ so fast n furious? Thanks.

  22. 22.

    Betty Cracker

    @BruceFromOhio: I hope other platforms that choose to traffic in disinformation and abusive content meet the same fate. But FB and Insta are behemoths, so it’s potentially a much bigger problem than Twitter, and the users are there for different reasons. It’s unclear to me if the outcome will be the same.

  24. 24.

    Barbara

    @Betty Cracker: Were it not for FaceBook groups I wouldn’t be on FB at all.  I am part of two groups, only one of which I really use at all. My now erstwhile fitness studio maintains a library of all of the virtual classes that have been taught since March of 2020.  They stopped producing new ones as of November 12.  It’s around 10-20 people who kept it going and it’s amazing they hung on for as long as they did.   Another complete break from my pre-pandemic life.

    I used to try to follow my cousins but around three of them spout so much stupid, shallow and offensive content that I just couldn’t take it.  I think my sister will let me know of any important family developments.

  25. 25.

    Brachiator

     

    It’s only when you look straight at Silicon Valley’s leaders you realise its core beliefs aren’t an ideology. They’re a personality disorder.

    I guess that this is a useful metaphor, but otherwise not particularly accurate? And what does this suggest, that all Silicon Valley executives need therapy or should be locked away?

    I don’t think that Silicon Valley is currently the root of all evil, or that tech libertarianism is inherently pernicious or well thought out, or consistent.

    Governments are not just pawns of technocrats. The government wants backdoors to your data, don’t care about your privacy or security.

    And the dark web of cyber criminals is it’s own thing, without regard to governments or technocrats.

     

    ETA. The Meta crap about election laws is insane and infuriating.

  26. 26.

    Ruckus

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    I left when he bought musked it up. My life is actually better for leaving, it’s like going cold turkey, bothers you for a bit then you feel, and are a hell of a lot better.

  27. 27.

    lowtechcyclist

    @RaflW:

    Confiscatory MFing tax rates.

    That’s really all I have to say any more. These parasitic billionaires are going to destroy everything, goddamit.

    This.  And do away with the loopholes and hidey-holes that enable them to avoid a good chunk of the taxes we’ve got.

  28. 28.

    Chris

    Obligatory reminder that various social media platforms did a very good job in the mid-2010s of stopping their sites to be used to propagate jihadist ideology and propaganda, let alone communications.  When white supremacist terrorism started to really tick up the same decade, people asked them why they refused to do the same thing there, to which a Twitter spokesman replied “because if we did that, we’d have to silence the accounts of too many right-wing politicians.”

  29. 29.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    Re. “Meta’s owner”: the company formerly known as Facebook is publicly held, in contrast to X/Twitter.

  30. 30.

    RaflW

    @Mr. Bemused Senior: Major caveat: “Even though he does not own the majority of the shares, Zuckerberg controls the majority of the company’s voting power, as he owns a type of share (Class B common stock) that allows him to cast 10 votes for every share he owns versus 1 vote a share that Class A common stock owners can cast.”

    Where’s the power, not the passive capital.

  34. 34.

    Chris

    Relatedly, Maria at Crooked Timber published an essay today called “Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder.” It’s worth a read, and the diagnosis in the title is 100% correct.

    Adam Cadre’s blog had a decent review of The Social Network and how it illustrates the mentality of the people at the top of the pyramid, and how much of it comes down to the joy of being able to express and act on your contempt for the entire world without them being able to do anything about it.

    On the other hand, I wonder how unique any of this is to Silicon Valley, tech culture, or the twenty-first century.  I think a lot of it is simply a one-percenter thing that happens to be more obvious with the tech-bros because 1) they’re what’s hot right now, and 2) the very nature of the business means you get to hear from them more often than, say, the Gordon Gekko types on the other coast.

    But I think the bottom line is simply that full-blown eugenicist authoritarianism in the Henry Ford or William Randolph Hearst vein has never stopped being mainstream among the one percent.  At best, they got quieter about it in public.  More likely, they simply poured more money into PR departments to clean up their public image.

  36. 36.

    Hoodie

    @Brachiator: I’d say that the bigger problem is the financialization of the economy, which is not limited to Silicon Valley.  A lot of these guys are finance bros who located in California instead of Wall St.  Silicon Valley was incredibly productive at one time, producing companies like HP and Intel that produced real tech.  However, since the advent of the internet, it seems to be populated by companies that claim to be revolutionizing commerce but are largely just doing things like circumventing regulation or using automation to shift customer service to the customer and thus reduce labor costs. It’s understandable why these are financially successful; they can quickly generate a lot of profits for the founders without  investment risks inherent in other tech.  These guys make millions off of creating and selling forgettable companies.

  37. 37.

    Splitting Image

    @The Kropenhagen Interpretation:

    My eye flickered to what I thought said “Batman,” then I read “$am Bankman-Fried.” Imagine my disappointment.

    Then, I said again, the article sounds interesting. Into my surprisingly large pile of unresolved tabs it goes.

    Actually, if you look closely at Batman, there is less difference than you’d think. Batman is a super-rich techbro with violent tendencies and eager to work outside the law. When you consider the tax breaks he’s got to be lobbying for to afford the Batmobile and all that other junk he’s got in the Batcave and all of the regulations he’s got to be skirting in order to keep it all secret, what you have in Batman is a more competent Elon Musk.

    Over the years I’ve grown to appreciate comics that don’t try to be realistic and don’t encourage you to think too much about how everything would work if they were realistic. (That Archie Andrews kid is keeping at least seven different girls on a string, for example….)

  39. 39.

    Geminid

    I saw a couple exciting state legislature stories. The NYT reports that the Democratic Legislative Committee has committed “more than seven figures” of its initial $60 million budget for 2024 to breaking up legislative supermajorities in Kansas, North Carolina, Kentucky and Wisconsin:

    The party is targeting states with Democratic Governors but overwhelming Republican legislative control, effectively battling to win back veto power.

    And, there is a Democrat running in the 115th Texas House District named Scarlett Cornwallis!

  40. 40.

    Anoniminous

    @Splitting Image:

    There’s some weird shit going down in Rivervale these days.

    Does Betty have Archie’s baby?

    Desperate to have a child of her own, Betty conspired with Cheryl and the town of Rivervale to sacrifice Archie to the Maple Maiden. And while she managed to conceive, her child was later taken from her womb by La Llorona.

  43. 43.

    Jinchi

    Meta Platforms will let political ads on Facebook and Instagram question the legitimacy of the 2020 U.S. presidentiali election

    But will they have any standards at all?

    Because Trump will fill the feed with calls to exterminate the vermin if they don’t.

  44. 44.

    Brachiator

    @Hoodie:

    I’d say that the bigger problem is the financialization of the economy, which is not limited to Silicon Valley.  A lot of these guys are finance bros who located in California instead of Wall St.  Silicon Valley was incredibly productive at one time, producing companies like HP and Intel that produced real tech.

    Good points. I would say that real tech is still being produced, but the pace of innovation has slowed to some degree. Also, some paths to innovation have not proven to be as easy to develop as many had hoped. This includes EVs and driverless cars, and various video technologies.

    I am cautious about the jump into AI.

    However, since the advent of the internet, it seems to be populated by companies that claim to be revolutionizing commerce but are largely just doing things like circumventing regulation or using automation to shift customer service to the customer and thus reduce labor costs.

    It’s not just about circumventing regulation. Regulation has not caught up to the ramifications of technology. Governments often don’t understand what is happening. And the heads of tech companies love to play at being inscrutable technology wizards who can’t be bothered to talk to ordinary humans.

    ETA. Technology often shifts operations and customer service to the customer or other end users. This is often desirable. This is a fascinating area for discussion.

  45. 45.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Chris:

    how much of it comes down to the joy of being able to express and act on your contempt for the entire world without them being able to do anything about it.

    This is the motivating factor of most conservatives and all abusers.  Very few of them have the money to act on it this freely.

  47. 47.

    oldster

    Maria’s essay is excellent, and it really ought not to come as such a revelation. I hope that enough people will join her in saying that the emperor has no clothes and is further more a stark naked nut-case that it will change from being a shocking act of truth-telling to being simply conventional wisdom. She’s right.

  48. 48.

    Tenar Arha

    @knittingbull:  &

    @TheOtherHank:

    Your reservations are accepted ;) if you guys prefer not to post your emails here, IIRC think we can ask Water Girl can get me in touch with you guys without you posting them. Let me double check with her if she’s okay with that.

    @Timill: your code has been sent.

    @MattF: thanks, if I have some left I’ll check if Fallows wants them.

  50. 50.

    Hoodie

    @Brachiator:

    Also, some paths to innovation have not proven to be as easy to develop as many had hoped. This includes EVs and driverless cars, and various video technologies.

    This is true, but may be exacerbated by having to compete for capital with the umpteenth form of Uber that can produce quicker “profits” for early investors.  Decades of ultra low interest rates may have contributed as well, it created a pool of dumb money looking for quick payouts.  As a patent attorney, I can’t tell you how many stupid internet companies came to us with variations on the same “sell dogfood on the internet” nonsense, and people were investing in them nonetheless.   I think EV development was starved for capital for years until Obama helped Tesla get over the hump.  We were working on EVs at Westinghouse in the 80’s, but on shoestring budgets.  Yeah, the tech definitely got better, but a lot of that was investments by government in things like silicon carbide semiconductor tech.

  51. 51.

    Captain C

    Charles Stross has a good piece up about how tech bros are taking the wrong lessons from Sci Fi, and getting lost in some questionable ideologies.  Some highlights:

    Hi. I’m Charlie Stross, and I tell lies for money. That is, I’m a science fiction writer: I have about thirty novels in print, translated into a dozen languages, I’ve won a few awards, and I’ve been around long enough that my wikipedia page is a mess of mangled edits.

    And rather than giving the usual cheerleader talk making predictions about technology and society, I’d like to explain why I—and other SF authors—are terrible guides to the future. Which wouldn’t matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me. Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real.

    Obviously, I’m talking about Elon Musk. (He named SpaceX’s drone ships after Iain M. Banks spaceships, thereby proving that irony is dead). But he’s not the only one. There’s Peter Thiel (who funds research into artificial intelligence, life extension, and seasteading. when he’s not getting blood transfusions from 18 year olds in hope of living forever). Marc Andreesen of Venture Capitalists Andreesen Horowitz recently published a self-proclaimed “techno-optimist manifesto” promoting the bizarre accelerationist philosophy of Nick Land, among other weirdos, and hyping the current grifter’s fantasy of large language models as “artificial intelligence”. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is another. He’s another space colonization enthusiast like Elon Musk, but while Musk wants to homestead Mars, Bezos is a fan of Gerard K. O’Neill’s 1970s plan to build giant orbital habitat cylinders at the Earth-Moon L5 libration point. And no tour of the idiocracy is complete without mentioning Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire CEO of Facebook, who blew through ten billion dollars trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, only for it to turn out that his ambitious commercial virtual reality environment had no legs.

    (That was a deliberate pun.)

    It’d be amusing if these guys didn’t have a combined net worth somewhere in the region of half a trillion euros and the desire to change the human universe, along with a load of unexamined prejudices and a bunch of half-baked politics they absorbed from the predominantly American SF stories they read in their teens. I grew up reading the same stuff but as I also write the modern version of the same stuff for a living I’ve spent a lot of time lifting up the rocks in the garden of SF to look at what’s squirming underneath….

    …

    …Anyway, for what my opinion is worth: I think this is bullshit. There are very rich people trying to manipulate investment markets into giving them even more money, using shadow puppets they dreamed up on the basis of half-remembered fictions they read in their teens. They are inadvertently driving state-level policy making on subjects like privacy protection, data mining, face recognition, and generative language models, on the basis of assumptions about how society should be organized that are frankly misguided and crankish, because there’s no crank like a writer idly dreaming up fun thought experiments in fictional form. They’re building space programs—one of them is up front about wanting to colonize Mars, and he was briefly the world’s richest man, so we ought to take him as seriously as he deserves—and throwing medical resources at their own personal immortality rather than, say, a wide-spectrum sterilizing vaccine against COVID19. Meanwhile our public infrastructure is rotting, national assets are being sold off and looted by private equity companies, their social networks are spreading hatred and lies in order to farm advertising clicks, and other billionaires are using those networks to either buy political clout or suck up ever more money from the savings of the poor.

    Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we’re living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?

    It’s because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They’re rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we’re not futurists, we’re entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it’s a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it. And that’s why I think you should always be wary of SF writers bearing ideas.

  53. 53.

    Kay

    Silicon Valley ideology valorises disruption in the board-room but crushes it in the increasingly digitised and surveilled classroom, and grinds its face into the concrete floor of the Amazon warehouse. Disruption is for CEO’s and funders, not for people who protest pipelines or strike to limit labour exploitation. Disruption is something that is done to us. It is not something open to us to do.

  55. 55.

    Chris

    @Captain C:

    Also, not technically sci-fi, but you’ve got to love the fact that some tech bros read Lord of the Rings and decided to name one of their inventions “Palantir.”

    I mean, what, was “Satan” already trademarked?

  56. 56.

    gvg

    @BruceFromOhio: Yes, I would not call the value of their holdings tanking as no blowback myself. Of course, they had so much in the first that losing that much value had insufficient impact so far. Tax the rich.

  57. 57.

    Martin

    Wait, Hagee was a speaker at the Israel rally? So they invited an openly antisemitic, but pro-Zionist (as in, please send all the Jews there so we can rapture this place up and while they’re there they can genocide the Muslims for us) speaker to this event?

    This isn’t helping.

  58. 58.

    Hoodie

    @Captain C: This highlights a major problem;  this system is designed to make a few people insanely rich quickly and, thus, distorts our entire economy.  It’s like we’ve turned our economy into somewhat of a giant lottery.  Some people hit it big simply because they were in the right place at the right time, they knew the right people, etc.  Confiscatory tax rates won’t necessarily solve this.

  59. 59.

    rikyrah

    Democracy Docket (@DemocracyDocket) posted at 7:30 AM on Wed, Nov 15, 2023:
    TODAY: New York’s highest court will hear oral argument in a lawsuit that will determine if the state’s Independent Redistricting Commission must reconvene to draw a new congressional map for 2024.

    Democracy Docket (@DemocracyDocket) posted at 7:30 AM on Wed, Nov 15, 2023:
    All eyes are on New York as the redistricting process could impact which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives in 2025. The Empire State’s 26 districts are currently held by 15 Democrats and 11 Republicans.
    https://t.co/cwnBJJx9Ow
    (https://x.com/DemocracyDocket/status/1724781852731252805?t=-yjDCil62x6BxJCBoARIkg&s=03)

  60. 60.

    rikyrah

    @Kay:

    Disruption is for CEO’s and funders, not for people who protest pipelines or strike to limit labour exploitation. Disruption is something that is done to us. It is not something open to us to do.

     

    UH HUH

    UH HUH

  63. 63.

    artem1s

    @Bill Arnold: from Breaking Bad: a smurf is a minion who is sent out to buy or (usually) steal cold meds that have Pseudoephedrine that are then used for meth cook.

    I doubt he meant that either.

  65. 65.

    Geminid

    @rikyrah: Rebublicans won several very close General Assembly races this year. Unless a recount changes the result, Dawn Adams will have lost the 82nd House District by 74 votes, and there was another very close race near Lynchburg that Republican Cris Obenshain won.

    I read that the Republicans’ closest Delegate loss was by 5 points, but 2.5 per cent swings would have netted Democrats 5 Delegate seats. I think those districts will fall the Democrats’ way in 2025, when Abigail Spanberger will likely head the ticket.

  67. 67.

    Martin

    @Kay: I think there is too much confusion about what is functionally happening here. This doesn’t speak to the personalities of the people doing that – I don’t quibble there.

    Everything in our society is built upon a fundamental ‘truth’ that every economic system has a set of variable costs on the supply side and a set of variable revenues on the demand side. And there are a bunch of rules that keep that more or less in balance – taxes, various rules on anticompetitive behavior, etc.

    ‘Disruption’ is not technology, though it’s usually interpreted as that. Disruption is taking the existing business model for a sector and replacing it with a different one that incumbent businesses cannot compete with or switch to without destroying themselves. And the mechanism that most typifies that is the rise of zero marginal costs goods and services. That’s the set of technologies that enable the disruption because it puts fixed costs on the supply side and variable revenues on the demand and it exploits the 200 years of tax law and competition rules that government is wildly too slow and frankly oblivious to respond to.

    There are *real* benefits to fixing the costs of various goods and services *if* you can reform your laws to pass those benefits onto consumers, which we are clearly struggling to do. But if you want to say ‘maybe we should turn that off until we can get a government that can respond to this’, understand that it’ll still develop in some other nation, and the US will still be ill equipped to deal with it. Frankly, it’s better that it’s running out of the US than anywhere else, despite all the problems it causes.

    What we need to do is to change the incentives for shitty people to keep chasing these things. Tax the rich, tax value-add, regulate in ways that addresses the problem and doesn’t seem oblivious to it, add consumer protections, remove externalities that these systems exploit.

  71. 71.

    trollhattan

    @HumboldtBlue: Hate flying now. Don’t hate flying, hate the commercial flight experience from TSA kabuki to the jampacked planes to most airports and the rental car upsell dance. “Second driver? That’ll cost ya.” Huh? Since when?

    Anyhoo, looks promising to make it out of 2023 having had zero flights. OTOH caught covid from the spouse during our big summer road trip, so there’s that.

  72. 72.

    Martin

    @Bill Arnold: the alternate use of smurf in e-sports is to play under an alternate account so you can test various new strategies without competitors being aware of what you’re testing, or to play heroes or roles that you aren’t particularly skilled in and be able to play closer to your actual ability with that hero or in that role. So it doesn’t just imply you are trying to dominate others.

    Also not what Comer meant.

  73. 73.

    Brachiator

    @Captain C:

    And rather than giving the usual cheerleader talk making predictions about technology and society, I’d like to explain why I—and other SF authors—are terrible guides to the future. Which wouldn’t matter, except a whole bunch of billionaires are in the headlines right now because they pay too much attention to people like me.

    Maybe we should just ban science fiction.

    Or reading. But then we would be Republicans.

    Very interesting read, though. The author may be giving himself and other writers too much credit.

  74. 74.

    steverinoCT

    @RaflW: I’d also be interested in a handle exchange so we can get more BJers connected

    As a convention we’ve been mentioning “Balloon Juice Jackal” or similar in our Bluesky profiles.

  75. 75.

    Betty Cracker

    @Geminid: I don’t expect organizers to keep all the lunatics out of the crowd, but to give a speaking slot to a hateful, antisemitic piece of garbage like Hagee is inexcusable. I’d be interested to know how the crowd reacted.

  77. 77.

    Tony Jay

    OT – 56 Labour MPs, including eight front bench Shadow ministers, give Kreepy Sir Starmer the finger by voting for the SNP’s motion in support of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The rest of the Parliamentary Nu-Labour corporate franchise opportunity voted with the Tories in support of Netanyahu’s invocation of Stand Your Ground.

    Those eight Shadow ministers will now be sacked from the frontbench, Nu-Lab’s crawling army of bureaucrats will double down on the plan to find faux-legal means to expel the other 46 before the next election, their online cheerleaders (professional gobshites one and all) will continue whining that “it’s all just performative mischief-making by Corbynites to hurt Sir Kier!” because they’re incapable of spelling ‘conscience’ never mind comprehending having one, and the Media outlets that spent 2016-19 running daily articles alleging STALINISM FEARS ROCK LABOUR whenever the previous leader failed to promote MPs who openly defied him will shrug and call these sackings ‘moves to the centre’.

    My MP is one of the 54. Votes like this are why he got my support in the first place, and why a LOT of lifelong Labour voters are seriously considering their options.

  78. 78.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @HumboldtBlue: Also, I have flown five times since 2015, that’s a total of 10 flights, on every trip I have come back sick with a chest cold. Every goddamned time. And I wear a mask.

    I suspect neither the mask nor the ambient germs are the cause of your problem. I suspect rather the extraordinary dryness of cabin air which is “refreshed” from external air that has nearly no humidity and results in swollen air passages just right for the breeding of germs (not to mention sinus headaches from dehydration which IMO is also the primary cause of jet lag miseries, YMMV).

    Next time you need to fly, I suggest you bring an empty 1- or 2-liter bottle through security, fill it up at a water fountain once beyond the claws of the TSA, and drink every drop during the flight. (On flight legs > 5 hr, bring extra bottles or buy extra H2O from the attendants.)

    Let us know how that goes.

  79. 79.

    Geminid

    @Betty Cracker: Putting Hagee up there was definitely a mistake. Hagee is well past his sell-by date and he was pretty rotten to begin with. His presence will be used to discredit every one else who participated.

  80. 80.

    Uncle Cosmo

    Just FTR, the “tech oligarchs” picked a side long, long ago, the one striving for the destruction of liberal democracy so they can do whatever they want to whoever they want and suck up as much value as possible with no consequences. It’s World War O, folks, O for Oligarchs, and the TOs have no problem funding fascism even unto Orangecandyass, Putin and Xi so long as they promote the destruction, secure in the self-assured certainty that they (the TOs) will be able to buy their way out of any inconvenient consequences.

  81. 81.

    Gravenstone

    Meta is a company, not the government. Free speech considerations DO NOT EXIST in that context. Fucking imbeciles.

  83. 83.

    a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)

    @RaflW:  Maybe we could have a spot on the front page where someone among the frontpagers (apologies in advance to Watergirl) could hook up people with codes to share with people wanting codes, without too much personal exposure.

  84. 84.

    Brachiator

    @Tony Jay:

    My MP is one of the 54. Votes like this are why he got my support in the first place, and why a LOT of lifelong Labour voters are seriously considering their options.

    I’ve watched Owen Jones and a YouTube outfit called Novara Media gleefully hammer Starmer and applaud Labour defections. I’ve even seen calls for Starmer’s resignation.

    I don’t get it. Starmer is not prime minister, so his position on the cease fire changes nothing. More to the point, the UK will do whatever the US tells it to do, and otherwise no one gives a shit about what Britain thinks about anything with respect to foreign affairs.

    And whenever I see conservatives attempt to offer an opinion about Hamas or the Palestinians, I always wonder what they had to say about Northern Ireland, another region where Britain thoroughly fucked things up.

    But again, what’s the point of all this. The Tory government is imploding faster than the media can spin defenses of Suella ‘Finally Sacked’ Braverman. Labour looks like it’s poised for victory no matter when a general election is called.

    But Jeremy Corbyn is not coming back. He has been so thoroughly demonized that I expect to see Lucifer rise from darkness whenever poor Jeremy’s name is invoked.

    If nu Labour is so goddam bad, is it really that hard to get new leadership? The Library Dems and the Greens aren’t going anywhere. So what is the realistic alternative? Do people really believe that the Tories and Labour are twin variants of the same entity? Or is this all some strange British tradition of self-torture before dutifully voting for Labour?

  85. 85.

    RaflW

    @Captain C: Charlie Stross asks “Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we’re living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?”

    Not really, no. I suppose you could say I have wondered why we’re living in what turned out to be really well written cyberpunk novels from the 80s, though.

  87. 87.

    WaterGirl

    @a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio): I sometimes say “you can announce it in the comments that I have your X number of codes, and the first X people to send me email requesting them gets them, until I run out of codes

    That’s easy for me – if they send me email I don’t have to look them up, I can just reply send them a code, as long as they last.

  91. 91.

    Tony Jay

    The point of it is that many Labour MPs support the UN’s call for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians. They couldn’t win the vote, but democracy isn’t just about voting for things that can get a majority, is it? If it was then Democrats wouldn’t bother voting against Republican policies in the House, would they? Sometimes, often, you just vote for what’s right because it’s right.

    On this issue Sir Plastic could have given the Party a free vote on a matter of conscience in line with the Party’s current panicked row-back on his own initial knee jerk support for Israeli law breaking and widespread public support for last Saturday’s huge pro-Palestinian March. It would even have helped win back some of the Labour voters and officials who have recoiled from the leadership’s current direction.

    But he didn’t. His crowd would rather double down on the autocratic purge of every policy, programme or position that a Tory couldn’t vote for (their words) and use their control of the Party to expel anyone with a different view. There’s no possibility of ousting them because they changed the rules to make that impossible. That’s what their imposition of centrally selected candidates for election was all about. Only MPs can change the leadership now and the majority of them are on the Right of the Party and looking forward to making bank after the next election hands them power.

    The only people still wittering on about the ghost of Corbyn are the cabal around Starmer who are obsessed with ritually burning the man in revenge for him daring to get elected in the first place. He’s not coming back. Centre-Left Labour isn’t coming back. What we’ve got is a bunch of hate-filled careerists indistinguishable from Cameron’s 2010 Tory Party and just as useless in the face of the country’s problems. Being opposed to that might be farting in the dark right now, but it’s also just common sense.

    Labour will get a majority (almost certainly) next year. Not because their vote will go up, but because the Tory vote will crater and the Lib-Dems will pick up seats. If the leadership wanted to stop driving away Labour voters they could do it, they have agency, but they don’t. They’d rather see their base vote plummet in seats they’re going to hold anyway as long as they pick up enough ex-Tory voters to grab seats in the north and Midlands,

    Sure, that’s a method of ‘winning’ an election, but as with extreme gerrymandering, it’s also a sure fire method for losing the election after that when those Tory voters return home and the Labour voters they’ve driven off don’t. But they just won’t listen.

    IMHO of course.

  92. 92.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Brachiator: To my mind battery EVs are actually really good now and have improved way faster than I would have expected 20 years ago– the main problem with them is that the company that got the big head start in the market is run by a tool.

  93. 93.

    Brachiator

    @Tony Jay:

    Centre-Left Labour isn’t coming back. What we’ve got is a bunch of hate-filled careerists indistinguishable from Cameron’s 2010 Tory Party and just as useless in the face of the country’s problems.

    But it’s not 2010. Labour has not been in power for decades. I’ve seen the damage caused by Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liz Truss and current prime minister Sunak. I’ve seen Dominic Cummings pull his Prince of Darkness bullshit? Sunak is running out of knaves to reshuffle into ministerial posts. Who are the Labour equivalents and how are they as bad?

    Being opposed to that might be farting in the dark right now, but it’s also just common sense.

    I get that Labour under Starmer is deeply flawed. But the bottom line is that if you truly believe that there is no difference between Labour and the Tories, then vote for the Tories. Let them win. Wouldn’t that be giving you what you really want?

    Or roll the dice and maybe get something different. And work to create a real new Labour. Or burn the shit down.

    If it were me, I would give Labour a chance to disappoint me. But I would not give the Tories another chance to kick me in the butt again. I would already know what that felt like.

  94. 94.

    Geminid

    @Steeplejack:

     

    @WaterGirl: The Democrat in the blue suit was Jared Moscowitz (Fl). He was one of the 30 or so new Democrats elected last year.

    I think Moskowitz was a mayor. All but 5 or 6 of last year’s Democratic class were either mayors or state legislators.

  97. 97.

    Brachiator

    @Matt McIrvin:

    To my mind battery EVs are actually really good now and have improved way faster than I would have expected 20 years ago– the main problem with them is that the company that got the big head start in the market is run by a tool.

    EV sales are stalling, even with tax incentives. Companies not named Tesla are having problems bringing EVs to market. Long term battery reliability is still an issue.

    Charging stations and charging times and even charger connection reliability are major issues. I’m not sure that there is a solid market for used EVs.

    As an aside, there is an interesting study indicating that EV owners put fewer miles on their vehicles than drivers of ICE vehicles do. This impacts air quality.

    We may get there with EVs, but it is a bumby road.

  98. 98.

    Tony Jay

    @Brachiator:

    I truly don’t know where you’re getting this false choice between sitting obediently in the corner saying “Thank You, Good Leader” whenever Starmer deigns to allow you to vote for His Party and voting for the Tories. That’s not reality. It’s simply not.

    The Tory vote is going to collapse. Some of those will go Labour, lots will go Lib-Dem, lots more will stay at home. That’s what the by-elections have told us. But in seats where the Tories haven’t a hope in hell of winning a lot of Labour voters are going to do exactly what the leadership have told them to do and either stay home or vote Green or Independent. That’s on the Nu-Labour leadership. They’ve chosen to plunge to the Right, this is what they get.

    It’s just democracy. You’re lucky enough to live in a country where your preferred Party is run by mostly smart people with mostly progressive values and a decent understanding of what it takes to keep all factions of the Party on board and working together. I don’t. My preferred Party is currently run by analogues of Joe Manchin, Joe Lieberman and Kristen Sinema who are actively purging it of anyone to their Left and telling the Party’s activist base to go fuck themselves.

    If we did a Trading Places swap, out of 10, how happy would you be to be told to shut up and clap or just go vote Republican?

  99. 99.

    Tony Jay

    @Geminid:

    Nope. But I’m a Labour Party member.

    Millions of other people who vote Labour because of what it’s supposed to stand for and do for them might not when the Party leadership tells them things have changed and their votes are no longer wanted.

  100. 100.

    sab

    @Geminid: Last time that happened the Liberal Democrats (under Nick Clegg) joined with the Tories to form a government. So there isn’t an alternative that works for actual old-fashioned Labour voters.

  102. 102.

    Timill

    @Brachiator: All the buyers are just waiting for the CyberTruck :-)

    Actually, next year’s EVs will be better than this year’s and so on. Three year old EVs are way outdated – more like 80s ICEs in comparison.

  103. 103.

    Tony Jay

    I’m going to bed now, but I’ll leave it with this.

    I am astounded that when you have a Party leadership deliberately distancing itself from policy positions that have been the bedrock reasons for the Party’s very existence for generations, many of which were in the platform the same leadership ran for office on just three years ago, in favour of policies designed to appeal to voters of another Party, the prospect of lots and lots of that Party’s traditional voters choosing not to vote for it results, not in questions about the Party leadership’s fitness, but in a sort of disinterested shrug and fingerpointing at the voters for letting the leadership down, like they’re the only ones with any agency.

    If Nu-Labour drive away millions of voters by adopting Tory policy positions. Then they point at the voters they drove away and say “Don’t blame us, it’s their fault.” if that leads to them not winning enough seats for a majority.

    What then? Who won that argument? What’s the point? Who benefitted? Why isn’t it the fault of the people who lost those votes? What does any of this have to do with how elections and campaigning and how all that shit actually works in the real world?

    I just… it’s baffling.

  104. 104.

    Brachiator

    @Tony Jay:

    I truly don’t know where you’re getting this false choice between sitting obediently in the corner saying “Thank You, Good Leader” whenever Starmer deigns to allow you to vote for His Party and voting for the Tories. That’s not reality. It’s simply not.

    I’m a simple man. If you tell me that the Tories and Labour are indistinguishable, then I think it only rational to hold you to the implications of this view and that you should vote Tory. You are not expecting anything different from the resulting government, so there is no reason to change.

    I am not impressed with Starmer and fear that he will be an ineffectual prime minister. But I don’t think he is another Boris Johnson. Or Theresa May. Or Liz Truss. Or Rishi Sunak. I got a lot of prime ministers available for comparison.

    I like Angela Rayner.

    If we did a Trading Places swap, out of 10, how happy would you be to be told to shut up and clap or just go vote Republican?

    Elsewhere I regularly have discussions with people who insist that there is no difference between the Democrats and Republicans. I definitely tell these people to vote for the GOP then.

    But I also know American politics and don’t know squat about the details of the UK. So, when any of these fools try to mention a specific area where the Democrats and Republicans are supposedly the same, I can usually show them that they are wrong.

    Also, I realize that I have absolutely no patience with the “no difference” crowd here. None. But here and the UK are not perfectly in alignment.

    And so I acknowledge the good reasons you have for your views and the nuance you bring to the discussion.

  105. 105.

    Brachiator

    @sab:

    Last time that happened the Liberal Democrats (under Nick Clegg) joined with the Tories to form a government.

    This was a strange coalition. I thought at the time that the Lib Dems and Labour had more in common than they did with the Tories. But Clegg joined with the Conservatives and got absolutely nothing in return. The Lib Dems became a husk of a political party.

  106. 106.

    Geminid

    @Brachiator: There is at least one big difference between the Labour Party over there and the Democratic Party here: Democratic candidates are picked by voters in primaries, while Labour candidates are chosen by the party apparatus.

  107. 107.

    Brachiator

    @Geminid:

    There is at least one big difference between the Labour Party over there and the Democratic Party here: Democratic candidates are picked by voters in primaries, while Labour candidates are chosen by the party apparatus.

    True enough. And in the general election, you are potentially voting for the national government.

    I can note that the current Labour Party has alienated voters and moved away from many of its policy positions.

    But to my eyes, the Tories are vile and openly contemptuous of the people who voted for them. I would want to see that party rooted out and scattered to the winds.

  108. 108.

    Slightly_peeved

    Sounds like the Labour Party is in another triangulation phase as it was with Blair, as the Democratic Party was in the 90s, and the Australian Labor party, because of compulsory voting, is in a permanent state of being. They are convinced, rightly or wrongly, that more votes lie in the centre than in the party faithful.

  109. 109.

    Bupalos

    Meta’s owner saw Twitter’s purchaser abandon any pretense of responsible content moderation (and personally amplify Nazi content) without facing any regulatory blowback and decided they could too.

    Not just regulatory blowback. Millions of people who understand the issue and actively wish Elon Musk could be fired into the sun continue to use the platform. Because it is convenient. Because it is where the action is. Because because because.

  111. 111.

    Tony Jay

    @Brachiator:

    Awake now.

    I do get what you’re saying, and why, and you’re not wrong. I guess it boils down to the sad fact we all start to understand as we get older. There are no absolutes. Nothing is ever really as simple as we’d like it. Shit is complicated and messy.

    So, yes, the Tories must go. But at the same time the current Nu-Lab leadership aren’t the answer to the country’s problems and they also must go. There’s no magic wand, no hero who will jump out of a blue box and fix everything. It’ll take work and time and given the odds and the opposition it might not even work.

    But it has to be done and saying why it has to be done is an important part of that.

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