> No society can police everything all the time, least of all a democratic society. A healthy society rests on a consensus about what is a deviation and what is normal. We venture out from the norm, but we know the difference between the outfield and home, the reality of everyday life. Without that, as we have now experienced, things fall apart.
> [...]
> Society renews itself as common sense evolves. This requires trustworthy, transparent, respectful institutions of social discourse, especially when we disagree. Instead we are saddled with the opposite, nearly 20 years into a world dominated by a political-economic institution that operates as a chaos machine for hire, in which norm violation is key to revenue.
> Social media's no-longer-young men defend their chaos machines with a twisted rendition of First Amendment rights. Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal from destruction.
If democracy relies on a consensus of what is “normal” than it has no possibility of surviving and probably shouldn’t.
If democracy has a feature worth keeping at all, it is a shared functional definition of rights that we honor whether the other person or people seem “normal” or not.
>In the years that followed, a surveillance society flourished in those rooms, a social vision born in the distinct but reciprocal needs of public intelligence agencies and private internet companies, both spellbound by a dream of total information awareness.
She sums up two decades of modern history in one sentence.
Also, her take on why antitrust approaches won't work is brand-new to me and it raises a critical point. Antitrust efforts against Standard Oil did not prevent the downstream effects of the business model, i.e., ecological disaster. They may be a necessary, albeit, temporary fix to the issue of competition in the marketplace, not the real harm inherent in surveillance for profit.
>Another thought experiment: Imagine that the America of 1911 understood the science of climate change. The court’s breakup decision would have addressed Standard Oil’s anticompetitive practices while ignoring the far more consequential case — that the extraction, refining, sale and use of fossil fuels would destroy the planet.
> Antitrust efforts against Standard Oil did not prevent the downstream effects of the business model, i.e., ecological disaster.
Even worse, it was seminal liberal makework. The owners of Standard Oil were saw their holdings double in value as it was broken up, and were now the owners of the resultant entities. It was money and effort burned for no purpose other than to support the careers of the kind of "progressives" that don't have a class-based critique or worker orientation. It was a pseudo-technocratic solution that didn't even really have a clear theory about how it would solve the problems that the size and market control of Standard Oil had raised.
When it comes to surveillance, I'm not sure that anything short of a Butlerian Jihad can stop this train. Limiting government surveillance powers just allows them to farm out surveillance to favored companies. Breaking up those favored companies just makes trying to stop the aggregation a game of whack-a-mole that no one would have the authority or interest to play.
We need to create enforceable rights based on values that are new. But the people who profit from surveillance will be powerful enough, if they aren't already, to destroy or silence any voice that endangers their business model.
You seem to think an antitrust enforcement is a shortcut to achieving progressive goals. It isn't. If anything, antitrust enforcement is an attempt to save market capitalism from itself.
The use of 9/11 to further surveillance policies is really unfortunate because the existing intelligence agencies mostly got it right before hand. The administration was briefed that a threat was imminent. I am curious if anyone could build a legitimate argument that internet surveillance would have made the intelligence accurate enough to stop the attack.
Beyond a certain breadth, an overload of specificity becomes too vague to engage with. Claims that cover such wide ground are impossible to refute or dissect.
The people who do it think they're well-informed and providing a service, but it's poor form. It forces readers into a poison choice: abandon nuance to pile on in blanket agreement, or bash their heads against each other bickering in 50 threads about 50 tiny points for eternity.
When I was beginning my journey and came across a wall of text like this, I didn't engage it with comments...that'd be absurd.
I'd review its bullets, deeply, because a comment of that depth, in forums such as these, is usually either misdirection because of a personal or paid agenda,
or it was somebody that was passionate about knowledge, & had decided this was the best way to spread less than obvious conclusions they'd spent time compiling, in hopes to spur someone else into learning more.
Skipping those, even if in bad form, because of the former, was a disservice to myself and my goals. So I learned to discern.
Please point out the irony. If this op-ed were published in the Rupert Murdoch's NY Post or read on Fox News, it might be ironic, but in the NY Times by Shoshana Zuboff, it is serious analysis. If you find it interesting, read her book.
For those who do not remember 11th grade English:
If something is ironic it's unexpected, often in an amusing way. If you're the world chess champion, it would be pretty ironic if you lost a match to someone who just learned to play yesterday. Ironic is the adjective for the noun irony. In contemporary speech, when we call something ironic, we often mean sarcastic. [From www.vocabulary.com]
Probably referring to their recent high-profile spat over publishing the legal name of a blogger contrary to their wishes, or perhaps appointing Sarah Jeong to the editorial board after her unethical revelations concerning Noami Wu (which were a violation of the agreement with Wu).
I’m sure you can find other ironic examples of NYT disregarding the privacy of vulnerable people for their own interests.
> [...]
> Society renews itself as common sense evolves. This requires trustworthy, transparent, respectful institutions of social discourse, especially when we disagree. Instead we are saddled with the opposite, nearly 20 years into a world dominated by a political-economic institution that operates as a chaos machine for hire, in which norm violation is key to revenue.
> Social media's no-longer-young men defend their chaos machines with a twisted rendition of First Amendment rights. Social media is not a public square but a private one governed by machine operations and their economic imperatives, incapable of, and uninterested in, distinguishing truth from lies or renewal from destruction.