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It projects a clean and progressive image, but the reality of Silicon Valley’s power is grubbier. Just how corrupt are the “information oligarchs”?
Fifteen years ago, when I worked at Sprint in Overland Park, KS, a teammate with an intelligence community background gave me some sagely advice. To make sense of the telecoms and tech industry, he counselled, you have to take account of the unseen needs and covert interests of the spooks and spies. I’ve held that in mind over the years, as many things you see make you go “hmmm…”.
I suggest that we can generalise this colleague’s insight. To make sense of the world, we need to realise we never have a full picture. As the guru-philosopher Alan Watts said: “Human consciousness is at the same time as being a form of awareness, sensitivity and understanding, is also a form of ignorance. … Now, the question that is absolutely basic for all human beings is: what have you left out?”.
Our perception is always limited, and open to manipulation: we each can only take in a very tiny part of the unimaginably big whole of this universe. Therefore it often pays to look into the shadows behind the public relations facade, as often you find interesting and unexpected things. In particular, be aware that corruption and crime can lurk just beneath the polished PR surface. Whilst this can be in the stereotypical form you might encounter at a 3rd world bureaucracy, in advanced economies it is often more subtle and systemic.
Indeed, we Brits are world leaders in such institutionalised abuse of power. As our formal Empire has long vanished, the locus of world power has shifted to the USA. Since “information is the new oil”, a key source of “military, industrial, media, academic complex” power is Silicon Valley. This offers access to unprecedented reserves and flows of private and personal data.
As power always corrupts, there is now a troubling pattern emerging of unethical activity there. Maybe some of us are paranoid and over-sensitive, and draw lines between dots where no relationship exists. However, there are so many dark dots showing up, the lines are beginning to draw themselves.
For instance, why does Google have such strong roots in “deep state” funding? Was its extremely close involvement with the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign appropriate for a company whose employees (and customers) span the political spectrum? Is its CrowdStrike unit pursuing morally upstanding activities, or is there another agenda at play? What was Eric Schmidt really doing in North Korea, which has been chamber of human rights horrors? He recently resigned as Alphabet chairman for a reason…
Twitter has been caught on camera by Project Veritas as having a cavalier disregard for its users’ privacy, manipulating feeds to suppress “wrongthink”, and terminating the accounts of dissidents who question foreign powers. I suspect worse may be to come: the Saudi funding behind Twitter was hardly part of an ethical investment portfolio. Four top executives have resigned, and @jack’s tenure as CEO looks terminal. What’s really going on here?
The close relationship of Amazon with the CIA, and its Washington Post media proxy is highly suspect to me, as the CIA has a long history of manufacturing mayhem. The working conditions in Amazon warehouses seem to be the product of calculated disregard for human wellbeing, a form of automated slavery that routinely drives workers to physical collapse. Whilst the technical and commercial achievements of Amazon are impressive, the risks to society of such concentrated power over information infrastructure should be a matter of wider public debate.
We are also seeing a stream of revelations of (child) sex abuse rings in major technology companies like Microsoft, backdoors in all Intel CPUs, and compromised devices being used in spy and blackmail rings. And has Facebook ever been fit for human consumption? The unfolding Cambridge Analytica scandal suggests the answer is negative. When Zuckerberg testifies to the House commerce committee tomorrow, remember that 85% of them will have received money from his company.
It is the responsibility of everyone to be awake and make their own judgement based on their best discernment of the full facts. So keep your eye on the shadows, and use your intuition to sense deceit or danger. If something feels wrong, it likely is.
Everything has a history, including Silicon Valley. According to a new media theorist, an influential Valley philosophy might underlie the current attitudes, values, and beliefs:
There is a Silicon Valley religion, and it’s one that doesn’t particularly care for people — at least not in our present form. Technologists may pretend to be led by a utilitarian, computational logic devoid of superstition, but make no mistake: There is a prophetic belief system embedded in the technologies and business plans coming out of Google, Uber, Facebook, and Amazon, among others.
Douglas Rushkoff, “The Anti-Human Religion of Silicon Valley” at Medium
In an excerpt from his new book, Team Human (2019), Rushkoff traces the history to a post-Cold War collaboration centered on Silicon Valley, aimed at first at preventing nuclear war, but branching gradually into a pursuit of immortality through digitization and AI:
Self-actualization through technology meant leaving the body behind — but this was okay since, in keeping with the gnostic tradition, the body was the source of human sin and corruption.
The cosmists talked about reassembling human beings, atom by atom, after death, moving one’s consciousness into a robot and colonizing space. The cosmists pulled it all together for the fledgling American transhumanists: They believed human beings could not only transcend the limits of our mortal shell but also manifest physically through new machines. With a compellingly optimistic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too gusto, the cosmists told America’s LSD-taking spiritualists that technology could give them a way to beat death…
The idea that lit up the turned-on technoculture was that technology would be our evolutionary partner and successor — that humans are essentially computational, and computers could do computation better. Any ideas that could be construed to support this contention were embraced. Douglas Rushkoff, “The Anti-Human Religion of Silicon Valley” at Medium
Such a cult might help explain something: It’s amazing how often the big tech companies get caught snooping and manipulating, as discussed in regular news media: All Ears: Always-On Listening Devices Could Soon Be Everywhere (Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2019); US regulators have met to discuss imposing a record-setting fine against Facebook for some of its privacy violations (Washington Post, January 18, 2019); If You Care About Privacy, Throw Your Amazon Alexa Devices Into the Sea (Gizmodo, April 24, 2019); Amazon Alexa: Illegally recording kids, privacy advocates allege (Futurism, May 9, 2019); Snapchat Employees Abused Data Access to Spy on Users (Vice, May 23, 2019); My Favorite Facebook Conspiracy Might be True (Medium, May 19, 2019).
Or else they are ridiculously careless with data (Google has stored some passwords in plaintext since 2005, Wired, May 21, 2019) —if carelessness is really what lay behind that. In an age where we are constantly tracked and our data is being sold (yes, even our medical data), that’s like accidentally leaving cash lying around.
We surely don’t need a cult-like atmosphere to explain why people are tempted by money, status, and power. The puzzling part is their seeming lack of ordinary insight into why others would find their behavior unacceptable. But if they believe the rest of us are doomed and anyway expendable, they would be oblivious to public opinion. They seem so out of touch it is almost funny. Well, it would be, if it weren’t so serious.
In this TED talk, Rushkoff recounts a memorable meeting where top tech billionaires share their apocalyptic fears and fantasies:
See also: The idol with feet of silicon: Religions based on artificial intelligence (AI) cannot transcend the limits of computers (Robert J. Marks)
Tales of an invented god The most important characteristic of an AI cult is that its gods (Godbots?) will be created by the AI developers and not the other way around
AI as an emergent religion Science philosopher Mike Keas’s new book discusses how AI and ET are merging, to create a religion of futurist magic
and
Can we cheat death by uploading ourselves as virtual AI entities?
Violence had taken a few months to get to Washington, but the country had been watching as masked wanna-be revolutionaries terrorized the elderly and young women at Trump rallies and Republican and conservative events across the states.
America’s corporate leaders didn’t join the riots, but they might as well have. President Donald Trump and his administration weren’t like any previous administration: They were different. They were dangerous. They needed to be stopped.
Violence had taken a few months to get to Washington, but the country had been watching as masked wanna-be revolutionaries terrorized the elderly and young women at Trump rallies and Republican and conservative events across the states.
America’s corporate leaders didn’t join the riots, but they might as well have. President Donald Trump and his administration weren’t like any previous administration: They were different. They were dangerous. They needed to be stopped.
So over the four years following the reintroduction of street violence to Washington, Big Tech and its friends launched a campaign of shadow-banning, suppression, and misinformation, first targeting crazy and less sympathetic elements on the fringe, before moving onto the simply helpless, and then even the powerful ones whom acceptable opinion had turned against.
What began with suppression of cynical conspiracies quickly grew into suppression of inconvenient facts. What started as shadow-banning morphed into outright banning. Independent, outsider fact-checks became arbitrary and unexplained internal decisions. Eventually, legitimate scientific and political views pushing back on COVID mandates were targeted.
As four years wrapped up, criticizing the riots and Russia hoax graduated to reporting on inconvenient primary documents that indicated corruption in the Biden family — none would be allowed. Thousands of people whose names few knew eventually became names like Alex Jones, and then became the third-largest newspaper in the country, all the way up to the person we once thought was the most powerful man in the world.
It was an incredible display of power, and none of it came from our government. In fact, Trump’s White House seemed powerless to stop it. The Republican Senate alternated between toothless threats and shrugs to “free markets,” while elected Democrats and their media friends either openly cheered or remained silent.
Silicon Valley’s courage has grown steadily as each step it took to silence and deplatform met weakness from the right and applause from the left. If the move to censor the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden was the moment Big Tech began its march on Rome, the subsequent silencing of the president and even congressional committees — without ever feeling the need to justify their actions — was crossing the Alps.
But the Alps weren’t the goal. So when a fringe element of Trump supporters launched an attack on the Capitol, Big Tech had all the justification it needed to take their campaign to the next stage.
More than justification, it would be easy: The Democrats had won control of the U.S. Senate that same day. But don’t be fooled: Even a robust Republican Senate majority would have lacked the power and nerve to stand up to America’s tech titans. Why? Simple: America’s political class is weak.
Our political leadership is “frail, old, and out of touch in a rapidly changing world,” The Federalist’s Ben Domenech wrote in his Wednesday newsletter.
The frail leadership of the United States is the great unremarked phenomenon of this moment… In this moment of crisis, we have what appears to be the most elderly class of political elites in the history of the nation. The octogenarian and septuagenarian set of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, Dick Durbin are white knuckling it to the end of their careers — attempting to make their mark before leaving the stage and passing things on to people who share none of their memories of the time before.
Now compare that to the strength and vitality of the corporate titans of New York and California. Sure, our leaders in Washington, cowering from death behind COVID masks and tens of thousands of ideologically vetted Guardsmen, might be convinced of their own power, but is Jeff Bezos convinced of it?
He and his cohorts are not, but they are convinced of themselves — and their role in “the arc of justice,” their place on “the right side of history.” They are not weak, and their mission to make the world anew is more than some cynical play for profit.
The corporate embrace of Woke ideology and morality might have once sprung from self-interested business practices and simple exercises in power-building, but for years now has been a religion. This religion gives these men such confidence that they truly believe they are serving the cause of right when they exile their critics and competitors from the public sphere.
Further, this religion extends beyond Big Tech, counting among its adherents other ultra-wealthy men like Michel Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. These men want a new order, and are convinced they can create it.
America’s leading businessmen were once grounded by ties to cities in the American South, Midwest, and West, but increasingly our capitalism has shed its old Chamber makeup. Today, America’s elites exercise outsized dominance almost exclusively from a tiny number of glittering coastal cities. These elites have a new church, and yes, a craven part of them must realize their profits might be hurt if they fail to devote themselves strictly enough to its tenets.
These companies have more power than any in history. True, the East India Company’s 200,000 armed men were a force to be reckoned with, but to control what is and isn’t truth on a global scale? Sure, the worst excesses of the so-called “robber barons” saw unions violently put down and rail traffic to New York City blockaded, but even they could not blockade information.
These men — the most powerful private men in history — share something with those Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters down in the streets: A total and unwavering belief in the righteousness of their own personal morality. It girded them when, last week, they discarded even the lie that for years has formed the center of their defense against the politicians and media they once felt it necessary to placate: that if you don’t like something in the system, you can build an alternative.
The decision by the most powerful companies in history to conspire against social media competitor Parler — without even an attempt to provide evidence of wrongdoing — was a step beyond any previously taken. By denying the No. 1-downloaded app in the country access to Amazon Web Services, the host it had built its existence on, the rulers of Silicon Valley destroyed the upstart.
In addition, with companies like online credit-card processor Stripe joining in, the ability of other “unacceptable” businesses and causes to so much as accept payments and donations is now on notice.
This isn’t surface level: This is the guts of capitalism, and it’s just begun. Credit card companies, banks — they’re moving into the innards of our freedoms and it will impact your business, newspaper, and yes, eventually even your church group if you believe the wrong Christian tenet.
In a free society, if you see an opportunity or don’t like what’s already out there, you can try to make your own. You can accept payments for services, turn a profit, hire, expand. These are both fundamental aspects of the American dream. In the span of one week they were shattered, not by government, but by private and unelected businessmen.
It’s a moment in Big Business’s campaign unlike any before: It’s the sacking of the American Dream. Thus far in Washington, our leaders have remained quiet, busying themselves with impeaching a man who is no longer even president.
The Thirty Years War is usually said to have begun on May 23, 1618, 403 years ago this spring. European leaders had been wary: They knew they were living on a tinderbox, and it seemed any incident might set it off. Royal marriages fell through, a Spanish plot to overthrow Venice was foiled, a duke died without heirs — but each time a weakened Europe stumbled back to its feet.
When there was a Protestant revolt in Prague, most vividly remembered for the Catholic statesmen thrown from a tower window at its beginning, everyone knew a fight was to be had, but few if any, preeminent Thirty Years War historian C.V. Wedgewood explains, believed this was the moment: “It was not clear until 17 months later, even to the leading men in the countries most deeply concerned,” she wrote in 1938, “that this revolt rather than any other incident in that stormy time had lighted the fire.”
When it did finally become clear, the rulers of the day lacked both the power and wisdom to end a terrible event that would fracture the continent and Western Civilization as its people knew it.
While all eyes are glued to an ugly, deadly, and tragic but ultimately isolated riot and the arrests that follow, the new religious zealots of the Commanding Heights have thrown our freedoms from the tower window. With a partisan corporate media in support, a frail political class in agreement or in fear, and a conservative resistance hopelessly compromised by Silicon Valley’s money and influence, America’s leaders lack the power and wisdom to end it.
The American people are not in for the kind of bloodshed and misery that characterized The Thirty Years War, at least not yet, but we may well be in for the complete fracturing of American society as we’ve known it. And make no mistake: This incident, more than any other incident in this stormy time, may have lighted the fire.
So over the four years following the reintroduction of street violence to Washington, Big Tech and its friends launched a campaign of shadow-banning, suppression, and misinformation, first targeting crazy and less sympathetic elements on the fringe, before moving onto the simply helpless, and then even the powerful ones whom acceptable opinion had turned against.
What began with suppression of cynical conspiracies quickly grew into suppression of inconvenient facts. What started as shadow-banning morphed into outright banning. Independent, outsider fact-checks became arbitrary and unexplained internal decisions. Eventually, legitimate scientific and political views pushing back on COVID mandates were targeted.
As four years wrapped up, criticizing the riots and Russia hoax graduated to reporting on inconvenient primary documents that indicated corruption in the Biden family — none would be allowed. Thousands of people whose names few knew eventually became names like Alex Jones, and then became the third-largest newspaper in the country, all the way up to the person we once thought was the most powerful man in the world.
It was an incredible display of power, and none of it came from our government. In fact, Trump’s White House seemed powerless to stop it. The Republican Senate alternated between toothless threats and shrugs to “free markets,” while elected Democrats and their media friends either openly cheered or remained silent.
Silicon Valley’s courage has grown steadily as each step it took to silence and deplatform met weakness from the right and applause from the left. If the move to censor the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden was the moment Big Tech began its march on Rome, the subsequent silencing of the president and even congressional committees — without ever feeling the need to justify their actions — was crossing the Alps.
But the Alps weren’t the goal. So when a fringe element of Trump supporters launched an attack on the Capitol, Big Tech had all the justification it needed to take their campaign to the next stage.
More than justification, it would be easy: The Democrats had won control of the U.S. Senate that same day. But don’t be fooled: Even a robust Republican Senate majority would have lacked the power and nerve to stand up to America’s tech titans. Why? Simple: America’s political class is weak.
Our political leadership is “frail, old, and out of touch in a rapidly changing world,” The Federalist’s Ben Domenech wrote in his Wednesday newsletter.
The frail leadership of the United States is the great unremarked phenomenon of this moment… In this moment of crisis, we have what appears to be the most elderly class of political elites in the history of the nation. The octogenarian and septuagenarian set of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Jim Clyburn, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, Dick Durbin are white knuckling it to the end of their careers — attempting to make their mark before leaving the stage and passing things on to people who share none of their memories of the time before.
Now compare that to the strength and vitality of the corporate titans of New York and California. Sure, our leaders in Washington, cowering from death behind COVID masks and tens of thousands of ideologically vetted Guardsmen, might be convinced of their own power, but is Jeff Bezos convinced of it?
He and his cohorts are not, but they are convinced of themselves — and their role in “the arc of justice,” their place on “the right side of history.” They are not weak, and their mission to make the world anew is more than some cynical play for profit.
The corporate embrace of Woke ideology and morality might have once sprung from self-interested business practices and simple exercises in power-building, but for years now has been a religion. This religion gives these men such confidence that they truly believe they are serving the cause of right when they exile their critics and competitors from the public sphere.
Further, this religion extends beyond Big Tech, counting among its adherents other ultra-wealthy men like Michel Bloomberg and Tom Steyer. These men want a new order, and are convinced they can create it.
America’s leading businessmen were once grounded by ties to cities in the American South, Midwest, and West, but increasingly our capitalism has shed its old Chamber makeup. Today, America’s elites exercise outsized dominance almost exclusively from a tiny number of glittering coastal cities. These elites have a new church, and yes, a craven part of them must realize their profits might be hurt if they fail to devote themselves strictly enough to its tenets.
These companies have more power than any in history. True, the East India Company’s 200,000 armed men were a force to be reckoned with, but to control what is and isn’t truth on a global scale? Sure, the worst excesses of the so-called “robber barons” saw unions violently put down and rail traffic to New York City blockaded, but even they could not blockade information.
These men — the most powerful private men in history — share something with those Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters down in the streets: A total and unwavering belief in the righteousness of their own personal morality. It girded them when, last week, they discarded even the lie that for years has formed the center of their defense against the politicians and media they once felt it necessary to placate: that if you don’t like something in the system, you can build an alternative.
The decision by the most powerful companies in history to conspire against social media competitor Parler — without even an attempt to provide evidence of wrongdoing — was a step beyond any previously taken. By denying the No. 1-downloaded app in the country access to Amazon Web Services, the host it had built its existence on, the rulers of Silicon Valley destroyed the upstart.
In addition, with companies like online credit-card processor Stripe joining in, the ability of other “unacceptable” businesses and causes to so much as accept payments and donations is now on notice.
This isn’t surface level: This is the guts of capitalism, and it’s just begun. Credit card companies, banks — they’re moving into the innards of our freedoms and it will impact your business, newspaper, and yes, eventually even your church group if you believe the wrong Christian tenet.
In a free society, if you see an opportunity or don’t like what’s already out there, you can try to make your own. You can accept payments for services, turn a profit, hire, expand. These are both fundamental aspects of the American dream. In the span of one week they were shattered, not by government, but by private and unelected businessmen.
It’s a moment in Big Business’s campaign unlike any before: It’s the sacking of the American Dream. Thus far in Washington, our leaders have remained quiet, busying themselves with impeaching a man who is no longer even president.
The Thirty Years War is usually said to have begun on May 23, 1618, 403 years ago this spring. European leaders had been wary: They knew they were living on a tinderbox, and it seemed any incident might set it off. Royal marriages fell through, a Spanish plot to overthrow Venice was foiled, a duke died without heirs — but each time a weakened Europe stumbled back to its feet.
When there was a Protestant revolt in Prague, most vividly remembered for the Catholic statesmen thrown from a tower window at its beginning, everyone knew a fight was to be had, but few if any, preeminent Thirty Years War historian C.V. Wedgewood explains, believed this was the moment: “It was not clear until 17 months later, even to the leading men in the countries most deeply concerned,” she wrote in 1938, “that this revolt rather than any other incident in that stormy time had lighted the fire.”
When it did finally become clear, the rulers of the day lacked both the power and wisdom to end a terrible event that would fracture the continent and Western Civilization as its people knew it.
While all eyes are glued to an ugly, deadly, and tragic but ultimately isolated riot and the arrests that follow, the new religious zealots of the Commanding Heights have thrown our freedoms from the tower window. With a partisan corporate media in support, a frail political class in agreement or in fear, and a conservative resistance hopelessly compromised by Silicon Valley’s money and influence, America’s leaders lack the power and wisdom to end it.
The American people are not in for the kind of bloodshed and misery that characterized The Thirty Years War, at least not yet, but we may well be in for the complete fracturing of American society as we’ve known it. And make no mistake: This incident, more than any other incident in this stormy time, may have lighted the fire.
