Monday, December 30, 2019

THE DEATH OF SILICON VALLEY BILLIONAIRES OF GREED AND CORRUPTION



Bokhari: From Utopian to Petty – Silicon Valley’s Decade of Decline

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg closeup
Anthony Quintano/Flickr
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In technology, “Moore’s Law” refers to the doubling of microchip processing power every two years. Come rain or shine, every two years, new computers will roll off the production lines twice as powerful as the previous generation. Unfortunately Silicon Valley has gone backwards over the last decade at the same speed.
Cultural progress isn’t like technological progress. Outside of historical catastrophes like the Dark Ages, the latter marches steadily forwards, while the former often regresses.
Over the past ten years, the values and ambitions of Silicon Valley have behaved in the opposite way to Moore’s Law. They’ve steadily regressed from idealism to pessimism, from libertarian to authoritarian, and from the utopian to the petty.
At the start of the decade, Silicon Valley’s largest companies displayed a great deal of hubris — but it was an idealistic hubris. Twitter promised to be the “free speech wing of the free speech party.” Facebook planned to “make the world more open.” Google wanted to “organize the world’s knowledge.”
Beyond the obvious adaptations of their technology, the tech companies delved into even more ambitious territory. In 2012, Google co-founder Larry Page personally hired Ray Kurzweil, the technologist and entrepreneur known for his prediction that the exponential growth of information technology would eventually allow humans to extend their life expectancy indefinitely.
That’s right — Google hired a guy who wants to make people immortal.
Similar lofty goals for the human race could be found everywhere in the early 2010s. In 2013, then-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt predicted that the Internet would “eliminate censorship and the possibility of censorship in a decade.” Twitter and Facebook were hailed by liberal observers as tools for radical social change in the Arab Spring.
Fast-forward to the present: Silicon Valley’s ambitions have descended from the utopian to the petty. The social media platforms that once gave safe havens to persecuted Arab dissidents now snitch on their own users over matters as trivial as Nancy Pelosi parody videos. Far from unlocking the secrets of mortality, Google now seeks to bury obvious, scientifically proven facts about the biology and psychology of gender — going so far as to fire high-performing employees who talk about them.
And what does Google’s woke employees now spend their time on? It seems to be less about conquering the frontiers of science and technology, and more about mining Breitbart News’ comments section for examples of “hate speech.”
As for aspirations to end censorship within a decade, don’t look for it in 2020’s Silicon Valley. As Google’s own researchers admitted, in an explosive document leaked to Breitbart News in 2018, the industry now helps perpetuate it — it’s “shifted towards censorship.” Even tech CEOs are pretty open about it these days. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has walked back his predecessors’ early-2010s talk about “the free speech wing of the free speech party” — he now says it was all just a joke!
For the most part, the big tech companies that transformed the 2010s have ended the decade in a mood of extreme pessimism about their own products. Like Dr. Frankenstein, they worry that they have created monsters. Some tech CEOs now compare Silicon Valley’s products to cigarettes, putting social media in the same category as a toxic carcinogen. Mark Zuckerberg now welcomes the fact that people spend less time using his platform.
The source of this self-doubt is purely political. Just look at how Google executives and employees reacted to the 2016 election. How did this happen? Did we do this? Were our platforms used for this? How can we stop it happening again?
Some of the introspection is the result of outside bullying, from institutions and political factions worried about how the internet has undermined their power. Mark Zuckerberg initially rubbished the notion that Facebook was responsible for the 2016 election, and that he ought to take more control over how his platform is used. “Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook … influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea,” said Zuckerberg.
The Facebook CEO sings a different tune today. After a year of relentless pressure from the media and advocacy groups, Facebook had done a complete U-turn. Not only did Zuckerberg admit “responsibility” for letting “fake news” on the platform sway the election, but he also implemented a drastic change to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, that had the effect of cutting traffic to conservative publishers.
There’s no doubt that the 2016 election was a pivotal moment, one that catalyzed big tech’s “shift towards censorship.” But Silicon Valley’s descent into pettiness, pessimism, and self-censorship actually began before Donald Trump was even a declared candidate. The early signs can be seen in the panics over comments sections that began early in the decade.
Many mainstream publications engaged in the comments panic, but the clearest example was The Guardian, a left-wing British newspaperThe paper had initially celebrated the openness of the Internet with its emphasis on robust debate in the comments section, but it quickly soured on the idea when its writers realized that free speech plus anonymity equals the end of political correctness.
As early as 2011, the newspaper was publishing op-eds declaring “The blog and chatroom have become forums for hatred and bile.” By 2014, it was publishing articles bearing headlines like “Comments sections are poison: handle with care or remove them“, and by 2015, “The case for ending online comments” had become an entirely normal, predictable Guardian opinion.
“Hatred and bile,” of course, was never the real issue — a story in the Daily Telegraph, highlighting the fact that male online commenters were more likely than others to disagree with fashionable feminist assertions, demonstrated the real insecurity fueling the panic. People were using the combination of anonymity and open platforms to challenge long-standing progressive positions, and they were doing so in considerable numbers.
The panic over Silicon Valley’s role in the 2016 election and other populist causes is the same fear writ large. You see, it’s all well and good when social media platforms help topple Arab dictators. But when they’re used to attack feminism, topple the Bushes, topple the Clintons, undermine the European Union — well, that can’t possibly be allowed!
The Internet, once so open and hopeful, is becoming more closed. Sometimes by choice, and sometimes by the demand of the media, politicians, and their own employees, tech companies have censored their own platforms.
Google, the company whose CEO once dreamed of ending censorship around the world, now censors its own search results within hours of a complaint from a left-wing journalist.
Facebook, which once held out the hand of friendship to new publishers and businesses, now punches with an iron fist, wiping out popular publishers with the flip of an algorithm.
Could you start a revolution on Twitter these days? Probably not, seeing as you aren’t even allowed to post politically inconvenient facts.
None of this was inevitable. The tech companies didn’t have to cave in to the pressure. They are perfectly capable of fighting the political establishment and winning — they knocked it for six in 2011 and 2012, when an Internet-wide protest by major tech companies forced Congress to shelve a planned overhaul of intellectual property laws.
Tech companies didn’t abandon their founding principles because they had to — they did it because they want to. Because they feel their platforms have been “misused.”
To be sure, there is a legitimate debate to be had about the consequences of free speech on the Internet. For example, the centuries-old tension between the right to free speech and the right to privacy has been brought to the fore in the digital era. As Gawker proved in the first half of the decade, it has never been easier to drag someone’s private life into a global spotlight — and tech platforms are largely shielded from legal repercussions for helping facilitate this.
We all participate in the destruction of our privacy. Social media platforms have encouraged young generations to post their craziest opinions, their most embarrassing photos, and their most offensive jokes on the Internet, where it remains forever. You would think that this shared experience would create a culture of forgiveness — that there would be a deeper understanding that we were all young and immature once, and that it’s unfair to destroy someone in 2020 for something they posted in 2010.
On the contrary, the reverse has happened — as partisan divides grow deeper, people are more eager than ever to “cancel” others over the slightest mistake. Everything you’ve ever said and everything you’ve ever done is now ammunition for the Twitter war.
Online harassment, “doxing” (the publishing of someone’s personal information without their consent), even “misinformation” — these also raise legitimate questions about online speech. But last year’s fiasco over the MAGA-hat wearing high school kids from Covington Catholic High School, who were doxed, harassed, and subject to a misinformation campaign while big tech platforms twiddled their thumbs, shows that neither Silicon Valley nor the mainstream media want to have a good-faith conversation about these problems.
To them, words like “online harassment,” “doxing,” and “hate speech” don’t have objective meaning — they’re just tools to deplatform political opponents.
Deplatforming is now one of the most urgent priorities of the left, even more so than at the start of the decade. As political losses mount, the losing side feels increasingly angry, and far more eager to silence their tormentors. And as populism toppled establishment cause after establishment cause over the course of the decade, progressives at tech companies felt — and still feel — a pressing moral compulsion to cut off the means by which that movement communicates. As Google VP Kent Walker put it in that infamous leaked Google video, he wants to make populism nothing more than a “hiccup” in history.
Another important moment from the Google tape is when co-founder Sergey Brin said Trump won because of “extremism” driven by “boredom.”
It’s not just its own technology that Silicon Valley has become afraid of — it’s human beings. In tech as in politics, there’s always been an unbreakable bond between negative views of human nature and authoritarian ideologies. If you believe human beings are fundamentally stupid, weak, and corruptible, you’ll be far less inclined to grant them liberty — after all, they’ll only misuse it.
That’s how Silicon Valley now feels about its users. The heads of tech CEOs are convinced that left to our own devices, we will end up deluded by “misinformation,” tricked by “fake news,” and radicalized by “hate speech.” They often cite the high view counts on videos about so-called “conspiracy theories as an example.
Of course, they don’t consider that viewing something doesn’t mean you accept it, and that accepting it doesn’t mean you’ll accept it forever. Strangely for people who work in a field so closely tied to Moore’s Law, the idea that people might improve or develop over time seems to elude them.
What also eludes them is any notion that their political values and priorities might actually be wrong, and that what they call “conspiracy theories” (essentially everything they disagree with) might be right. Or that the populists who use their platforms aren’t “extremists” who need to be suppressed for the good of society, but real citizens with real concerns, trying to exercise their democratic rights in an age where Silicon Valley controls the only effective town squares.
That, for an industry notoriously lacking in humility, is probably asking too much. Silicon Valley ends its decade in a strange place — it’s pessimistic about the technologies it has created. And yet, despite that pessimism, its leaders still believe they are right about everything.
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.




A new Gilded Age has emerged in America — a 21st century version.
The wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia, where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.

 

Josh Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate Power,’ Tech Billionaires


The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.

In an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder




Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other Americans

The wealthiest Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking analysis from a pair of economists reveals.

For the first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman finds.
The analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class. Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23 percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47 percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot via the New York Times)
The analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt writes:
For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate taxAnd they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat. [Emphasis added]
The report comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the elite.
“The same consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade, open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national security or for American workers or for American families or for American principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,” Hawley said in an August speech in the Senate.
That increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by economic research showing a rise in servant-class jobs, strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times the rate of other Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

Census Says U.S. Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018

 

(Bloomberg) -- Income inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the first to incorporate
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
But the distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties, has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states -- California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level, while the reading was lower in 36 states.

 

 





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