deplatforming

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The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

By exploiting the urge to defend our commitments, they usurp attention which they could never earn on the merits. You need not be a professional propagandist to see that protesting or deplatforming someone is like putting up a neon sign attracting attention to her. After all, if an idea is dangerous, then it must be important; if a speaker is worth deplatforming, then she must have something interesting to say. Competitive condemnation is a game we can choose not to play. Next time you feel the urge to protest some piece of nonsense, to rebut it (and thus repeat it), to deplatform it, or to organize outrage against it, consider going out for a pizza instead. Don’t feed the trolls.

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The outside world keeps butting in, and internal dissent keeps cropping up, and reality keeps asserting itself. In self-defense, authoritarian regimes sooner or later turn aggressive, toward their own dissidents and eventually toward outsiders, too. They brand dissidents as traitors, seek to exclude them from power or social participation, boycott and deplatform them, dehumanize and cancel them. Eventually, they use violence, sometimes to the point of seeking to wipe out a political faction or ethnic group altogether. “When complete agreement could not otherwise be reached,” wrote the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in his great 1877 essay, The Fixation of Belief, “a general massacre of all who have not thought in a certain way has proved a very effective means of settling opinion in a country.”

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It can exploit misinformation (false information), disinformation (deliberate falsehoods), and what has recently been called mal-information (information which is true but used misleadingly). Although the means vary widely, the end is this: to organize or manipulate the social and media environment to demoralize, deplatform, isolate, or intimidate an adversary. State actors have traditionally understood propaganda and disinformation as psychological or informational warfare against an adversarial regime. Modern trolls view it the same way. By exacerbating conflict and mistrust in the target society, they can cause headaches for their adversary and potentially destabilize it.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

Behind Kennedy, in third place, are Ty and Charlene Bollinger, pro-Trump conspiracists who hawk books and DVDs touting their loopy claims, including that vaccines fulfill Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates’s plan to inject people with microchips. Deplatforming these repeat offenders is “the most effective and efficient way to stop the dissemination of harmful information,” the center said. Yet Facebook, Google’s YouTube, and Twitter had to that point failed to enforce their own policies prohibiting COVID misinformation, and most of their accounts remained active. By the end of 2021, that had belatedly begun to change.[11] It’s no accident that Alex Jones failed to make it into the Disinformation Dozen. Deplatformed in 2018 and 2019, his social media presence remains a faint shadow of what it was, despite constant efforts to sneak back on.

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By late 2021 less than 1 percent of all traffic to Infowars’ website came from social media, according to an analysis for the Times by Similarweb,[12] an internet tracking company. Deplatforming blunts misinformation superspreaders’ influence and access to funding. White nationalist Richard Spencer, who rode Trump-era bigotry to stardom, had his social media accounts yanked in the aftermath of the 2017 neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville. Sued for his role in that violence, Spencer told a judge in 2020 that he was having so much trouble raising money online he couldn’t afford a lawyer.[13] Spencer’s National Policy Institute has closed. He lives in Montana, shunned even by his neighbors.[14] To be sure, deplatforming is a pretty blunt weapon.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Coaston, “YouTube, Facebook, and Apple’s Ban.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Casey Newton, “How Alex Jones Lost His Info War,” The Verge, August 7, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/7/17659026/alex-jones-deplatformed-misinformation-hate-speech-apple-facebook-youtube. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Brian Stelter, “Reliable Sources: Alex Jones Has Been ‘Deplatformed.’ Now What?,” CNN, August 7, 2018, https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/07/media/reliable-sources-08-06-18/index.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Jack Nicas, “Alex Jones and Infowars Content Is Removed from Apple, Facebook and YouTube,” New York Times, August 6, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/technology/infowars-alex-jones-apple-facebook-spotify.html.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

His anger at the press translated mostly into increased ratings for his enemies; CNN’s Jim Acosta, who spent every waking minute proclaiming that he was endangered by Trump’s overheated talk, became a household name thanks to his grandstanding. At no point did Acosta fear arrest or even deplatforming. The shock of January 6 was that the guardrails collapsed for a brief moment in time after holding for years on end. And then the guardrails were re-erected, including by some of Trump’s erstwhile allies. Now let’s turn to the other side of the aisle. In the aftermath of January 6, America’s institutional powers swung into action on behalf of authoritarian measures. Establishment media broadly promoted the idea of deplatforming mainstream conservatives and conservative outlets. CNN reported that the Capitol riot had “reignited a debate over America’s long-held defense of extremist speech.”

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John Aidan Byrne, “JPMorgan Chase accused of purging accounts of conservative activists,” NYPost.com, May 25, 2019, https://nypost.com/2019/05/25/jpmorgan-chase-accused-of-purging-accounts-of-conservative-activists/. 42. Dana Loesch,” Mailchimp Deplatforming a Local Tea Party Is a Hallmark of Fascism,” Federalist.com, December 16, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/mailchimp-deplatforming-a-local-tea-party-is-a-hallmark-of-fascism/. 43. Caleb Parke, “Conservatives call for PayPal boycott after CEO says Southern Poverty Law Center helps ban users,” FoxNews.com, February 28, 2019, https://www.foxnews.com/tech/conservatives-call-for-paypal-boycott-after-ceo-admits-splc-helps-ban-users. 44.

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Leftist interest groups immediately began pressuring other major banks to do the same: American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said the union would not recommend Wells Fargo’s mortgage lending program to its members because of ties to the gun industry.40 In May 2019, Chase Bank began closing bank accounts for customers deemed radical, including Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys and radical activist Laura Loomer. Jamie Dimon, CEO of Chase Bank, said, “Very directly, we have not and do not debank people because of their political views.”41 For now, presumably. This threat extends beyond the financial services industry. When Amazon Web Services, whose sole job is to provide cloud services, decides to deplatform Parler, that’s polarizing. When Mailchimp, an email delivery service, refuses to do business with the Northern Virginia Tea Party, that’s polarizing.42 When PayPal announces that it uses slurs from the Southern Poverty Law Center to determine which groups to ban, that’s polarizing.43 When Stripe announces it will not process funds for the Trump campaign website after January 6, that’s polarizing.44 The question here isn’t whether you like any of these groups.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

Where, in the past, she put out plaintive videos about the unfairness of having her accounts suspended, she now wears deplatforming as a badge of honor, exploiting it as a fundraising pitch. “We really need you,” she tells Bannon, “because since we’ve been reporting on this, we’ve been deplatformed again!… We got bumped off of YouTube so come please to DailyClout.io.” When her Twitter account was reactivated by Musk’s conspiracy-friendly regime, her first salvo back was: “Greetings. Signed, Deplatformed seven times and still right.” She knows that in the Mirror World, only “sheeple” get to speak unhindered, while prophets must battle to be heard.

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“Introducing Unrelated Services or Products” (like that time Colgate got into frozen dinners, only to discover people didn’t want their beef lasagna from the same people who make their toothpaste). “Losing Control of the Brand” (like, oh, I don’t know, having the words and actions of a serially deplatformed conspiracy monger attributed to you amid a deadly pandemic). At the time Hon offered his free advice, brand dilution was making headlines because Nike had announced it was suing Lil Nas X and the art collective MSCHF for that very violation. Without the sports giant’s approval, the marketing-savvy artists had taken 666 pairs of Nike Air Max 97 running shoes, inserted drops of human blood into their soles, renamed the sneakers “Satan Shoes,” and sold them for $1,018 a pair.

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Again and again, she invoked the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—in her fifteen-minute “slavery forever” video, she referenced “the CCP” five times, the same number of times as she said “the West.” “This is literally the end of human liberty in the West if this plan unfolds as planned,” she told Steve Hilton in March 2021. If the passports become a reality, she said in her own video, “there won’t be capitalism.” Already, she said, the tech companies (with their deplatforming of misinformation) and the government (with its various Covid mandates) were engaging in “CCP-type conditioning … conditioning us not to be members of the West.” All the Covid responses, were, at bottom, about “weakening the West, weakening our society, weakening our children.” It was, she said, “un-American.”

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

80 This is an extraordinarily appalling letter, intended to intimidate and threaten targeted center-right broadcast and media organizations, for the sole purpose of silencing their speech. And virtually none of the other media and news organizations wrote or spoke against it. The reason: they agree with it. Even more, many news groups, journalists, and opinion writers were the first to propose de-platforming Fox, OANN, and Newsmax and are campaigning for government regulators and these platform companies to shut them down—as with Parler; which brings me back to the American media, where I started this chapter. The intersectional movements that form the core of American Marxism are largely supported by the Democratic Party and promoted by the media.

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Therefore, speech, debate, and challenges to Marxist-centric ideas are not tolerated. The purpose is societal and economic transformation; the means are social advocacy and activism. Opposition must be denounced, besmirched, and crushed. In fact, it is now obvious that the letter to these various corporations resulted from media demands for de-platforming Fox, OANN, and Newsmax, which preceded the letter’s date. On January 8, 2021, CNN’s Oliver Darcy wrote: “[W]hat about TV companies that provide platforms to networks such as Newsmax, One America News—and, yes, Fox News? Somehow, these companies have escaped scrutiny and entirely dodged this conversation.

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And yet we rarely, if ever, talk about them.”82 Notice Darcy’s Alinsky tactics as he attempts to smear the cable networks and certain television hosts, including me: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”83 Neither the networks nor the hosts he mentions had anything whatsoever to do with the storming of the Capitol Building. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof picked up where Darcy left off, Alinsky tactics and all, and joined the de-platforming campaign. He wrote: “We can’t impeach Fox or put [Tucker] Carlson or Sean Hannity on trial in the Senate, but there are steps we can take—imperfect, inadequate ones, resting on slippery slopes—to create accountability not only for Trump but also for fellow travelers at Fox, OANN, Newsmax and so on.”84 Thus, Kristof demanded from his Times soapbox that “we”—the Marxist-like mob—must hold these nonconforming media outlets and hosts to account; that is, they must be silenced.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

Go to note reference in text “You will not replace us”: “Unite the Right Pre Game Torch March,” YouTube, April 17, 2018, video, 8:16, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPPQScy9Z7M. Go to note reference in text He’d been deplatformed: Ignacio Martinez, “The Atonement of an Alt-right Troll,” Daily Dot, May 22, 2019, https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/baked-alaska-atonement-alt-right-deplatforming. Go to note reference in text It was easy to relate: Tasneem Nashrulla, “We Blew Up a Watermelon and Everyone Lost Their Freaking Minds,” BuzzFeed News, April 8, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/we-blew-up-a-watermelon-and-everyone-lost-their-freaking-min.

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So was a pro-Trump singer-songwriter, Joy Villa, in a tight red, white, and blue dress with the word “Freedom” on the skirt, and the Black Trump supporters known as Diamond and Silk, who had recently won an apology from Facebook, which had treated their political claims as dangerous misinformation. They walked among easels carrying enlarged words like “deplatforming” and “demonetization”—the tools that had begun to be used to chase extreme voices off social media—with their definitions. Another enlarged Trump tweet read, “Social media is totally discriminating against Republican and conservative voices.” Then they took their seats in the Rose Garden, where Trump delivered a broadside against Facebook and Twitter, which had made all of their careers, for taking mild steps to enforce the platforms’ own rules.

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When, in December of 2019, he was arrested in Scottsdale, Arizona, for spraying Mace into the eyes of a bouncer, an officer reported that Mr. Gionet “informed me that he was a ‘influencer’ and had a large following on social media,” according to a police report. By then, Gionet had been subject to the evils that had been denounced at Trump’s social media summit. He’d been deplatformed—thrown off Twitter and Twitch—and had his YouTube videos demonetized. So he was streaming to DLive, a blockchain-based service, when he entered the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He strode around like he owned the place. “America First is inevitable! Fuck globalists, let’s go!” he yelled. At one point he advised other rioters not to damage anything; at another he yelled at a police officer that he was a “fucking oathbreaker, you piece of shit.”

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

Yes, they’ll concede, we hear stories about campus protests, but students have always protested. They’re young and idealistic. It’s practically a rite of passage. Also, the accounts of intolerant students are overhyped. It’s mostly a few activists at elite universities5 who demand trigger warnings, safe spaces, and the deplatforming of everyone who disagrees with them.6 The majority of students continue to support freedom of speech. Mostly, they just keep their heads down, and focus on their work, particularly at community colleges and other working-class institutions. Why should we worry about the actions of a few entitled students at our most elite universities?

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There have also been more overt attempts to silence certain views on campus. “No-platforming” policies for particular legal or political groups and certain public figures have become common,16 though they often fly under the radar. Certain views—academic views shared by professionals—are considered too dangerous or even “violent” to be allowed a platform. Unlike deplatforming drives—in which someone who has been invited to speak has that invitation rescinded—policies that disallow certain views in the first place attract little attention. In the United Kingdom, more than 50 percent of universities restrict speech, especially certain views of religion and trans identity.17 This problem is expansive.

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During the 1970s and into the 1980s, the radical and materialist feminist viewpoint held sway in the universities, but—following the turn to applied postmodernism and the creation of intersectional feminism, queer Theory, and postcolonial feminism—the intersectional feminists, queer Theorists, and trans activists have gained dominance. This has led to the deplatforming of once-popular feminist figures like Germaine Greer and Julie Burchill for their views on trans identity and sex work. Radical feminists also face fierce criticism from postcolonial and intersectional feminists because they see women as one class and are therefore frequently opposed to cultural relativism.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

Facebook Business Help Center, Facebook, 2021, www.facebook.com/business/help/2593586717571940?id=673052479947730. 4. Ahmari, Sohrab. “Meet Your (Chinese) Facebook Censors.” New York Post, 21 Oct. 2020, nypost.com/2020/10/20/meet-your-chinese-facebook-censors/. 5. Loesch, Dana. “Mailchimp Deplatforming a Local Tea Party Is a Hallmark of Fascism.” The Federalist, 16 Nov. 2020, thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/mailchimp-deplatforming-a-local-tea-party-is-a-hallmark-of-fascism/. 6. Montgomery, Blake. “PayPal, GoFundMe, and Patreon Banned a Bunch of People Associated with the Alt-Right. Here’s Why.” BuzzFeed News, 2 Aug. 2017, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/the-alt-right-has-a-payment-processor-problem. 7.

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Of course, he didn’t bother emailing me afterward once Facebook said it was an error. People said similar things about Marjorie Taylor Greene too, and I doubt they noticed Twitter’s subsequent correction. In both cases, the damage was already done. And even worse, these incidents reveal just how much everyday Americans trust these behemoths. Errors or not, this broad wave of deplatforming didn’t just happen to prominent politicians, who at least had other avenues for voicing their grievances. It happened to ordinary Americans too, in shocking numbers. The message was clear: comply or we’ll shut you up, permanently. It was nothing short of a Soviet-style purge of political dissent.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

“Managing Harmful Conspiracy Theories on YouTube,” YouTube Official Blog, YouTube, October 15, 2020, https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/harmful-conspiracy-theories-youtube; Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny, “Twitter Bans 7,000 QAnon Accounts, Limits 150,000 Others as Part of Broad Crackdown,” NBC News, updated July 21, 2020, www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/twitter-bans-7-000-qanon-accounts-limits-150-000-others-n1234541; “An Update to How We Address Movements and Organizations Tied to Violence,” Facebook, Meta, updated November 9, 2021, https://about.fb.com/news/2020/08/addressing-movements-and-organizations-tied-to-violence. 36. Will Bedingfield, “Deplatforming Works, But It’s Not Enough,” Wired, January 15, 2021, www.wired.co.uk/article/deplatforming-parler-bans-qanon. 37. “The Numbers,” Lostpedia, accessed November 28, 2021, https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Numbers. 38. Dan Hon (@hondanhon), “re the content generation problem for ‘regular’ ARGs I mentioned above. For every ARG I’ve been involved in and ones my friends have been involved in, communities always consume/complete/burn through content faster than you can make it, when you’re doing a narrative-based game.”

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And because there is no coherent QAnon community in the same sense as the Cloudmakers, there’s no convention of SPEC tags. In their absence, YouTube first annotated QAnon videos with links to the QAnon Wikipedia article, then banned many entirely; Twitter banned 7,000 accounts and restricted 150,000 more, NBC reported; and Facebook banned all QAnon groups and pages.35 These are useful steps. Deplatforming works.36 It reduces the reach of extremist content and destroys the delicate network of connections between followers. Even if some migrate to surviving social networks and forums, many won’t bother. Still, technical fixes cannot stop QAnon from spreading in social media comments or private chat groups or unmoderated forums.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason by Dave Rubin

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, butterfly effect, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, deplatforming, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, job automation, Kevin Roose, low skilled workers, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple, unpaid internship, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The left’s vision is a new social order that despises our hard-fought freedoms (eroding the First Amendment in favor of hate-speech laws), promotes socialism (through the redistribution of wealth), and denies scientific fact in order to weaponize the power of feelings (by asserting that there are more than two genders, for example). Worse still, they implement all of these things with brute force: violence, censorship, character assassination, smear campaigns, doxing, trolling, deplatforming, and online witch hunts. Tricks that are deliberately designed to leave people down and out. Ideally, jobless and without the resources to push back. If you see no problem with all of this, or even condone it as part of a greater “good,” then we have some serious work to do. You’ve got Stockholm Syndrome and need urgent intervention.

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The article about YouTube radicalizing people to the far right ends with the subject becoming a lefty. You can’t make this shit up. Cain also later admitted that he had never considered himself “alt right” anyway, so The New York Times fabricated a narrative in yet another attempt to intimidate YouTube into deplatforming creators. These three examples combined (which are just a drop in the bucket) help explain why trust in mainstream media is at an all-time low. According to a 2018 poll by the Gallup and Knight Foundation, the overwhelming majority of Americans distrust the media. Specifically, 90 percent of Republicans, 75 percent of independents, and 66 percent of moderates.

System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

If you care about privacy, this all sounds appealing unless you are the head of the FBI, trying to track down terrorist sympathizers who are plotting an attack in a major US city or a human rights campaigner in India who has discovered that political gangs are using encrypted communication technologies to organize anti-Muslim violence in advance of an election. Just to underscore the enormity of this challenge: After the siege of the US Capitol and the deplatforming of President Trump, downloads of end-to-end encrypted applications exploded. As the plotters of the insurrection decamped for smaller but completely private messaging platforms, the task of tracking and disrupting the activities of domestic terrorists became far more difficult. How should we weigh the value of privacy against other important benefits?

…

In a post justifying the decision, it noted that “the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence.” Dorsey later further defended the decision, writing that “Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all.” The decision to deplatform the sitting president of the United States brought swift reactions worldwide. Between declarations that it was a long-overdue action to stop a fountain of dangerous misinformation and heated cries by others of censorship and left-wing bias stands the central issue of how social media platforms actually deal with the millions of daily posts containing hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation.

…

For example, a number of companies agreed to pull ads from Facebook in 2020 as part of the #StopProfitForHate campaign when the company refused to take down or limit exposure to Trump’s post “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Of course, the inverse is also possible. Some users might choose platforms with looser content moderation, as we saw with the migration to Parler after the deplatforming of President Trump. However, the data so far suggest this will be an attractive option for a relatively small share of total users. Government should get involved when organized efforts to spread misinformation and disinformation threaten the integrity of the democratic process. We already recognize an appropriate role for government when we want to stop child pornography, human trafficking, copyright violation, and radicalization.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

What criteria are used to censor certain speech? Ideas that I disagree with? Thoughts that differ from your thoughts? Anything that the majority determines is unacceptable? This is another form of tyranny, a tyranny of the majority. 3. It is not just the right of the speaker to speak but for listeners to listen. When colleges deplatform speakers or students succeed in silencing a speaker through the heckler’s veto, the right of the audience to hear the speaker’s ideas is violated. 4. We might be completely right but still learn something new in hearing what someone else has to say. 5. We might be partially right and partially wrong, and by listening to other viewpoints we might stand corrected and refine and improve our beliefs. 6.

…

In my case, my devils include creationists who reject the theory of evolution, Holocaust deniers who reject the theory that the Nazi regime intended to exterminate European Jewry, scientists who risk their reputations and careers to study such radioactive topics as racial group differences in IQ and gender differences in cognitive abilities or career preferences, and conservatives and centrists who challenge the far-left dogma on college campuses and find themselves deplatformed before speaking or vetoed by hecklers while speaking. These are the devils of Part I of this book, The Advocatus Diaboli: Reflections on Free Thought and Free Speech, and I try to give them their due through a fair hearing of their opinions, even when I reject them. Even the Catholic Church employed an Advocatus Diaboli – a Devil’s Advocate – tasked with arguing “against the canonization (sainthood) of a candidate in order to uncover any character flaws or misrepresentation of the evidence favoring canonization.”9 The position was established in 1587 by Pope Sixtus V when it became apparent to the church that many claims of miracles – offered to elevate favored candidates to sainthood – were bogus, such as pieces of the true cross, saints’ relics, weeping statues, bleeding paintings, and especially miraculous healings that might have happened by chance or through the natural healing capacities of the body.

…

Since I matriculated as an undergraduate in the early 1970s on the wave crest of the Free Speech Movement of the late 1960s, I was taken aback that the anyone would doubt this central tenet of liberty. I shouldn’t have been, given that signs had appeared the previous few years – starting around 2013 – with the deplatforming (disinvitation) of controversial speakers; the emphasis on protecting students’ feelings from ideas that might challenge their beliefs; the call for trigger warnings about sensitive subjects in books, films, and lectures; the opening of safe spaces for students to retreat to when encountering ideas they find offensive; and the dispersal of lists of microaggressions – words, phrases, statements, and questions that might offend people.

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

In a sense, I began to enjoy deceiving them, taking an acrid pleasure in my own duplicity. But anger at these bigots was only part of what I felt. Some of my rage became directed at the people who oppose strong action against neo-Nazi organizing. I raged against white moderates—the people who don’t believe in de-platforming Nazis from every perch they get, or facing down their marches, depriving them of audience and influence and a safe pedestal from which to spread their bile. The people who say: Ignore them! Let them march! Let them tweet, let them speak on campus, let them have their say and they will be defeated in the marketplace of ideas.

…

“Whether the demonstrations turn into riots or another damp squib of hammer & sickle flag-waving idiots chanting moronic, mindless slogans before going home having achieved absolutely nothing remains to be seen,” he wrote. At the time, InfoWars’s influence over the conspiratorially minded right-wing sphere was nonpareil. “Around 2017, pre-deplatforming, InfoWars was best understood as acting as an amplifier,” Anna Merlan, author of the 2019 book Republic of Lies, which focuses on American conspiracy theorists, told me. Driven into the superheated heart of conservative paranoia by Watson, the “Antifa Civil War” myth began to effloresce in earnest.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Hillary Clinton is pretty good at this, as evidenced by her speech to Goldman Sachs where she explained that she thought it was always important to have one opinion for the general public, and another one for the people listening to her paid speeches. Crimethink - This is a thought crime against the State, which included thinking anything that conflicted with the principles of IngSoc. They believed that all crimes began with a single thought, so if they could control thoughts then they could control crime. The de-platforming of social media accounts that run counter to the views of the government by their partners in Silicon Valley is Version 1.0 of the Crimethink concept. Fake News Words Some terms that are thrown around by the corporate media are so Orwellian and nonsensical that one really has to laugh at their audacity of using them in their nightly news broadcast with straight faces.

…

The “alternative media” has been making things more difficult for the controllers over the past half-decade, starting with the revelations from Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, both were rewarded with sequestration and isolation in foreign countries for their troubles. It is a horrible thing in the sense that the controllers do have the ability to switch off those voices that dare to stand up to their plan for an Orwellian Ministry of Truth by de-platforming them one at a time, or in the case of Alex Jones, colluding to remove him from multiple platforms all at the exact same time. Not everyone in the alternative media had their channels taken away, but most faced some version of digital censorship that comes in a variety of flavors. The first salvo in the information war on social media came in the form of demonetization, where the videos or content that were uploaded onto the platform were prevented from showing advertisements, thus removing any financial benefit that might have been associated with a particular video or post.

…

The most common method of deleting video channels and social media accounts is to accuse the content provider of a “Violation of Community Guidelines”, a catchall phrase that makes the accusation that the content provider has posted something against their rules and subsequently the entire channel has been terminated from the platform effective immediately. No discussion, no appeal, no judge, no jury, no rights, and no more channels. What is crazy about these cases, and there are many, is that what sometimes gets a channel de-platformed is a video that had lived on that channel in peace and love for the past three years without any issue but now all of a sudden was so offensive that not only is that video deleted, but every video the person ever created is gone as well. Facebook might put a content creator in “Facebook Jail” for 30 days where their content cannot be seen or modified, before popping back up after a month.

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, anti-bias training, autism spectrum disorder, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, deplatforming, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, off grid, Overton Window, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech bro, young professional

If ads are being served on their videos, chances are good, depending on how many views, they’re making ad revenue based on Google, Facebook, YouTube, serving ads against their content. So, in that sense, de-platforming is good. It does slow them down quite a bit.13 When social media companies have been brave enough to take these steps, the impact has been significant: Milo Yiannopoulos saw his influence and platform greatly reduced after his ban from Twitter, with reports of his finances plummeting and tours being cancelled. ‘If you look at [far-right conspiracy theorist] Alex Jones, for example,’ Davey points out, ‘when he got de-platformed, he lost a zero off his regular viewing figures.’ As I write this chapter, the news comes in that Facebook, having taken many months to pluck up the same courage as Twitter, has decided to permanently ban Yiannopoulos and Jones, alongside five other high-profile extremist figures.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

(The book actually celebrated student battles against the Klan, but someone saw the cover and found it offensive.)139 Such standards should be embarrassing for the schools. Yet the overall trend toward such micromanaging of speech is in decline. A report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education found a 50 percent decrease from 2009 to 2020 in the number of American colleges earning its most restrictive “red light” rating.140 As for the “deplatforming” of controversial speakers at colleges that gets so much attention, it occurs far less often than news coverage implies. A BBC survey of 120 UK universities found just six canceling speakers from 2010 to 2018 because of what the speakers were anticipated to say,141 while in 2018, American college administrations disinvited eleven speakers142—not good, but also not enough to man the freedom-of-speech barricades.

…

He had tossed some tasty red meat to conservatives, and the narrative of victimization by the Left was advanced. It goes beyond campuses. Trump’s son Donald Jr. advocated the dismantling of the “technology giants,” which he called “the greatest threat to free speech and our democracy today” because they “deplatform people at the behest of liberals.”147 This grievance was leavened into a threat when the president tweeted that the “radical left” is in “total command” of the major Internet platforms. “The administration,” he continued, “is working to remedy this illegal situation.”148 The result was the executive order attacking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Others continued to doubt whether disinformation and foreign interference were much of a problem. There were substantive concerns, of course. In the wake of Twitter banning President Trump’s account, calls for restraint on content moderation have grown louder. Prominent tech figures such as David Sacks have cautioned against “decisions to permanently ban or de-platform individuals and/or businesses with no ability to appeal.”66 As someone that has spent years working on content moderation issues, I am still confident and hopeful that conduct-based approaches can be effective ways of addressing platform abuse while simultaneously upholding foundational free speech principles.

…

An American intelligence agency (perhaps alerted by a tech company) might determine that Russian intelligence operatives are spreading disinformation to influence an American election, with all of their posts across Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit coming from the same few IP addresses in St. Petersburg. That information could then be shared across allied nations—similar to how information about terrorist accounts is disseminated—allowing the intelligence operatives to be de-platformed across the free Internet. Get caught conducting an influence operation, and you’re not just banned from one platform in one country—you’re essentially banned by the entire free online world. We could similarly use this system to detect and punish firehosing—once again, sanctioning malign foreign actors based not on content but on patterns of nefarious conduct.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Or, to put it another way, in an age of instant global connectiveness and increasing homogeneity of ideas, there remain limits to Americanized elasticity: the more regional concerns, the more languages, the more transnational issues, the more lands, the more customs that America must oversee, the more its original core is attenuated. The more Silicon Valley looks westward across the ocean for its talent, the less it seems to look eastward to invest in its kindred Americans; the more it seeks to synchronize global norms of censorship and deplatforming, the more it will come into conflict with the Bill of Rights. The more the United States puts its money, its military, its people, and its resources at the disposal of others, the fewer such assets will be available to serve the interests of its own citizens. And the more Americans recalibrate their values with those of the wider world, the less resonance their own constitution will have.2 We should keep these incongruities in mind as we seek to harmonize the world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in our own image.

…

Whether all fifty Democratic senators would remain unified enough in efforts to end the filibuster—the key to enacting a subsequent radical reset of American institutions—became the political question of early 2021. Not in doubt was that private companies judged the controversial end of the Trump administration would mean a free license to ban, deplatform, and censor both use of social media and the users themselves. Soon after, thousands of Trump followers had their social media accounts censored or frozen. Those who had posted evidence of attending a rally to support challenges to the acceptance of the Electoral College vote—and yet did not participate in violent protests with other splinter groups—were sometimes fired from their jobs, or banned from travel, or had their businesses boycotted.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

I kept asking myself, how could someone so smart have come to join this cult, believe this stuff, and engage in these antics? But maybe I was confused because I was seeing it the wrong way. Cult members aren’t usually actively angry, but pacified and complacent. After all, they’ve found The Truth. They’re smiling, not griping or complaining that their griping has been de-platformed. No, this wasn’t really a cult so much as a case of classic internet addiction. Do we ever ask, “How could someone so smart have become an addict?” No, because addiction is triggered and maintained by a whole different part of one’s physical and emotional makeup. If anything, addiction enlists a person’s intelligence to maintain the supply of drugs and fend off all efforts at intervention.

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-globalists, Bernie Sanders, carbon tax, centre right, coronavirus, currency manipulation / currency intervention, decarbonisation, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, employer provided health coverage, fake news, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, illegal immigration, immigration reform, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nate Silver, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QAnon, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, W. E. B. Du Bois

It is getting close to the time when, per America’s founding documents, citizens will start forming into well-regulated militias in preparation for the lawful defense of the Constitution. And maybe I’m the right person to sketch out how that should work. You know, maximum cell size. Encrypted comms. Like I said, I abhor violence. But civil war is coming, and, if it does, well-meaning but poorly informed and relentlessly de-platformed conservatives are going to need a handbook.14 Weird right-wing street gangs have formed in the Trump years, Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, that seek out confrontations with black-masked anarchist groups, often dubbed Antifa, for “antifascist.” (“Antifa” is antifascist in the same sense that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a democratic people’s republic.)

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Black Lives Matter has yet to achieve measurable police reform and few police officers have gone to jail for murdering Black people. The right, too, has had its own failures. The jubilant tiki-torch-wielding fascists who marched in Charlottesville have been driven back into their holes as Richard Spencer, Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes, and numerous other representatives of the right have been “deplatformed” by the major social media companies. Criticisms that paint the digital-analog political model that has emerged in the past decade as primarily an artifact of filter bubbles, virtue signaling, and slacktivism have some validity. The power that the tech titans have to shape and censor our political reality, particularly because these platforms have become a primary source of news, is deeply concerning.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

And much of the right-wing revolt against the system has a similar attention-seeking quality: conservative populists talk about overthrowing what they see as a left-wing system of surveillance and cultural control, but their specific demands often circle back to a desire for their own place within the system—a space to monetize their YouTube videos and to circulate their pro-Trump memes, free from fears of shadow banning and deplatforming and banishment to obscure apps or social spaces. In other words, Trump-era populism draws a certain kind of energy from moving back and forth across the safety/danger line, but when pressed, it prefers to appeal to the system as a client demanding services, or as a subject demanding its rights, rather than accepting the options for exile—understandably enough, since most of the extrapanoptical options are crawling with white supremacists, and the provocateurs who actually get banished from the social media monopolies soon find themselves unable to monetize their provocations.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

All of this together means that the conversation about what to do about QAnon and movements like it is, in Phillips’ view, in the wrong place. It focuses on individual fixes and on symptoms, and ignores the broader systems changes that would need to take place. ‘The conversation is about moderation. It’s about deplatforming, it’s about demonetisation,’ she concludes. ‘It’s not about all of the underlying stuff that gives rise to all of those other symptoms. So, we really miss a lot when we’re not thinking about it all in those ecological terms.’ What does that mean? It means if you want to cut off something like QAnon, you need to cut it off from the things that sustain it – tackling the grounds where it breeds, the hate that feeds it, the incentives for politicians to play along, the online advertising model that can make feeding conspiracies lucrative.

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, deplatforming, en.wikipedia.org, false memory syndrome, Frances Oldham Kelsey, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Jeff Bezos, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, scientific mainstream, Skype, social contagion, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship

And they believe that “affirmative therapy” is either a terrible dereliction of duty or a political agenda disguised as help. All of them read Lisa Littman’s paper with great interest, believing she was onto something. All suspect that this epidemic may be the result of peer contagion. They also have all suffered ostracism, deplatforming, and public censure for having insisted that gender dysphoria ought to be treated—and not merely facilitated. They believe that it is wrongheaded to regard helping a patient overcome gender dysphoria as “conversion therapy.” They are dissidents from the current order, by dint of therapeutic duty and the Hippocratic oath.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Even today, some Marxists long for “a fully automated luxury communism” where technology has ended scarcity and created a “post-work society.”23 Sadly, such utopian visions can lead to frighteningly dystopian results. Technology may connect people in unprecedented ways, but it appears to be constraining intellectual debate under the control of a few powerful companies. The widespread censorship and “de-platforming” of unapproved views already being practiced, notes law professor and author Glenn Reynolds, could presage a new form of technologically enhanced thought control.24 The rewiring of society could be accelerated by an even more remarkable, and somewhat terrifying, biological transformation. For a half century, scientists have been dreaming of engineering humans to limit reproduction, or to transmit information directly into the brain.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

The Index looks at ‘the amount of procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, and decision approvals within organizations’. 70 Kirsner (2018) 71 See for example Cummings (2014) 72 Erixon and Weigel (2016), p. 153 73 Storrs Hall (2018) 74 Nichols (2017) 75 See for example O’Mahony (2019), p. 199 76 Drezner (2017) 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Lukianoff and Haidt (2018), p. 110 80 Ibid., p. 111 81 Ibid. 82 Bannerjee and Duflo (2019), p. 1 83 Ibid., p. 127 84 O’Connor and Weatherall (2018) 85 Haidt and Lukianoff (2018), p. 77 86 It is curious that many of the pioneers of a previous generation, from Peter Singer to Peter Tatchell, have been ‘cancelled’ and deplatformed from speaking engagements. 87 Thompson and Smulewicz-Zucker (2018), p. 132 88 Tollefson (2020) 89 See for example Belot (2018) 90 Kaufmann (2010) 91 Drezner (2017) 92 Williams (2018). Alternatively: go on Twitter. 93 Davies (2019) 94 Thanks to Erixon and Weigel (2016) for these two insights. 95 O’Mahony (2019), p. 256 96 See for example Goldin and Kutarna (2017), p. 264 97 O’Mahony (2019), p. 256 98 Erixon and Weigel (2016), p. 142; see also Roy (2012). 99 Grush (2019) 100 Brennan (2019) 101 Storrs Hall (2018) 102 Wallace-Wells (2019), p. 7.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America by Charlotte Alter

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, ending welfare as we know it, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Hangouts, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microaggression, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, TaskRabbit, tech bro, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, We are the 99%, white picket fence, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Reporting from the Young Women’s Leadership Summit, hosted by the conservative group Turning Point USA, New York Times reporter Astead Herndon observed that “more than any political ideology, the women at the summit appeared united by their criticism of recent social movements.” To them, he wrote, “there was nothing worse than being labeled racist, sexist or homophobic by ‘the left,’ because liberal name-calling was worse than any sin that could precede it.” (Of course, Turning Point USA did its own fair share of de-platforming, hosting a “Professor Watchlist” of left-leaning academics for conservatives to boycott.) That’s why young conservatives loved Dan: he attacked the outraged mob of “woke police” that seemed to be always attacking them, but unlike Trump, he wasn’t always digging them into an even deeper hole.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

In 2016, shortly after Trump’s election, Huffman was so angered that he used his database privileges to edit comments from r/The_Donald members making fun of him. When evidence surfaced showing what he’d done, Huffman issued an apology.33 After 2016, numerous other sites were scrubbed from the web, hidden from Google searches, banned from social media, or otherwise de-platformed. Popular conservative social media accounts were banned for their political views, cutting them off from access to their users. Carpe Donktum, the internet handle for a prominent pro-Trump meme maker with 270,000 followers, was kicked off Twitter for copyright violations in June 2020.34 For anyone who’s spent any time on Twitter, where millions of memes using preexisting images are floating around constantly, it was an absurd excuse.

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

The UN’s highest leadership has repeatedly praised the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); BRI has been inserted into the critical Sustainable Development Goals; BRI and the Community of Common Destiny have appeared in UN resolutions; and a wide range of UN bodies—such as UNICEF, UNESCO, UNHCR, and DESA—have either endorsed BRI or funded and collaborated with it.32 In other cases, China has used its leverage in the ICAO and the WHO to marginalize Taiwan. It successfully de-platformed some NGOs critical of Beijing’s human rights record and platformed its own “government-organized” NGOs (i.e., GONGOs) that follow Beijing’s lead on key issues. And its top officials, like former DESA head Wu Hongbo, have been unapologetic about putting national over international obligations: “as a Chinese-national international civil servant, I don’t yield in matters concerning China’s national sovereignty or security interests and resolutely defend the interests of my country.”33 He once boasted of using UN security to “drive out” a Uyghur activist that he declared was not part of an “approved NGO” and had been the subject of an INTERPOL “red notice”—factors for which Beijing was itself responsible, and a useful case study in China’s efforts to “deliberalize” UN architecture.