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Notes -
Vibe-Changes and the Still-Misunderstood Freedom of the Press
Some headlines have formed around Biden's Farewell Address and his invocation of the phrase "tech-industrial complex". From the speech:
For those of us who are old enough, this typifies a yuge vibe change from the "90s consensus" that tech is magic, that it's a democratizing force, that it can only do good in the world, and that the only thing that can possibly stop the progress of history toward utopia would be if government even put one single iota of regulation on it. Of course, this is not a vibe change that happened overnight. A lot has happened over the years. Insane proliferation of technology and connected devices, colossal increases in number of users and usage rates, displacement and reorientation of entire industries. With that came the shift from "Web 1.0" to "Web 2.0", and folks can debate whether "Web 3.0" has crashed and burned ten feet off the launchpad or whether it's still just slowly picking up steam. With the rise of bitcoin making it easy to cash out on internet crime, there are probably only a few ideological holdouts who still think that it cannot possibly be touched or that code is law or whatever.
So, glossing over mountains of events that have happened in the past 20+ years, what are the President's biggest concerns?
I'll start with AI, only to quickly drop it. No one here needs a retread of those debates, which are all too familiar. I'll only call attention to the same point as above - the vibe is completely opposed to a complete hands off, let it be what it be, surely it will be a good democratizing force vibe. Almost no one thinks that AI code is law, that if, say, a public university RLHF'ed their way into getting a bot to discriminate against white people or conservatives or whatever, then that's just how the world is and that nothing can be done, hands off the tech. The AI doomers are only an extreme example of how completely antiquated the old view is.
Similarly, for the main event, the President is very concerned about the core function of "information technology", which is to convey information. Make no mistake, this is a broadside on the core conception of what this stuff does, and it cannot be easily excised in some way. It is an acknowledgement that there can be power in tech, and to many, where there is power, there is something to be seized.
One of those industries that holds significant power and which has been disrupted and displaced several times in history is the press. The press, itself, was a disruptive technology, significantly affecting the old ways of scrolls, papyrus, stone carvings, etc. We've seen the rise of radio and television before the internet. With that, I would like to once again claim that this view of freedom of the press gets the history entirely backwards:
So therein lies the contradiction. One cannot simply leave the entire internet alone; extorting someone via IP is not conceptually different than doing so by voice. But gobs and gobs of the core purpose of the internet is to simply convey information, as one would have in the past by going to the local printer and then handing out pamphlets. It seems that people really want to break this centuries old consensus, just like how the 90s consensus has crumbled. What's messed up about it is that they want to break that consensus in the name of that consensus. It's as if since no one seems to remember what a physical printing press is, you can just call whatever you want "the free press", and no one will bat an eye.
Is there a steelman? Possibly. The President talked about editing, facts, and lies. Perhaps one can just slightly tweak his speech to say, "Libel law is crumbling," and that fixes the glitch. Indeed, it would be conceptually coherent this way, but who's going to raise their hand to sign up for that? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? The nightmare of trying to wade through concepts of "misinformation", "disinformation", "malinformation", etc. is too scary, and the well is too poisoned to have any hope of bipartisan agreement to bring libel law up to the task of the internet. In fact, even just this morning, I listened to the oral argument from a case that was in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, where the entire issue was the fine-grained distinction between a "false statement" and one that is "misleading but not false". These arguments happen, probably have to happen sometimes, but are, for the most part, relatively rare. Anyone who wants to Make Libel Law Great Again in order to "fix" the internet has a monumental task in front of them. I don't know how they'd do it. The only thing I know is that continuing to propagate the misinformation that this is about "the free press" is going to occasionally cause me to write a far-too-long, far-too-annoyed comment.
I know this is a pet peeve of yours, but I think the you're misportraying what happened. The vibe shift you describe - where people went from thinking that tech, the internet, whatever, is essentially self-regulating, and any power that would rise would end up being organically balanced out by a new power that would meet it, to thinking that government regulation might be necessary to keep things balanced, and prevent one power from taking over - did take place to some extent, I'm an example of it, but this is not what you're seeing here.
What you're seeing here is people confident that a certain set of rules will guarantee their perpetual victory, suddenly realizing their enemies can adapt, and use these rules to score a win as well. The same happened with the idea of freedom of speech, the moment it turned out it turned out that establishment ideas lose badly in an environment of free discourse. It's no coincidence that the 90's vibe was still alive and well during the Arab Spring, and only started shifting after Trump I and Brexit. Internet crime seems like nothing more than an obvious excuse for what they actually want to do - control political discourse.
I’m not convinced that’s a contradiction. The view that tech was good and would make life better was predicated on a bunch of liberal assumptions.
1). That humans in their state of nature were naturally libertines, naturally good, free from hate anger and so on. This is now demonstrated to be false. Give humans free speech and they’ll use it to control other people, to scam and cheat and rent seek, and preach hate and division. Thus the internet essentially ended up doing the opposite of what the liberals thought it would do.
2). That the neoliberal consensus of the WWII era had won decisively enough that it could hold up when people were allowed to choose freely and advocate for their own ideas. It turns out that, when allowed such freedoms, the neoliberal consensus is mostly popular as a luxury belief system rather than as deeply rooted convictions. Things like LGBT+ might be tolerable in very small doses, but they aren’t things that most people actually want normalized. Likewise, while people might diversity in abstract, but will often pay a fair premium to avoid the consequences of diversity.
3). For whatever reason, tge liberals tended to assume that not only were the computer science nerds on their side, but that they would continue to be on their side. It’s not pretty clear that most people in tech are firm capitalists, don’t like corporate telling them what to think, and reject culture war scolding pretty much.
I'm not sure I can make a better case that it's a contradiction, than you just did.
3) is fair enough, just a particular faction going after an ex-ally turned rival.
But with 2) we're already touching on a contradiction. Liberalism is supposed to be about self-determination of people under it. Diversity is not it's explicitly stated terminal goal, so if people are rejecting it, you're not suppose to take away rights that you supposedly consider fundamental.
1) Demolishes liberalism entirely. If communists say "central planning did the opposite of what we thought we would, all hail the free market", they're no longer communist. If you limited your criticism to the particular technology of the internet, it might be salvageable, but if the problem stems from faulty assumptions on human nature, what is there left of liberalism?
I mean I’m not disagreeing. I think especially in its modern and postmodern forms liberalism has failed nearly as completely as communism has. And as the contradictions become more obvious, the need to reassert control over the public is going to get much worse. We’re in the stage of the fall of liberal democratic politics in which the results of elections are being declared “threats to democracy.” Or where our freedom of speech is so sacred that we’re going to demand the cancellation of people for crime-think, labeling of hate-facts as misinformation or disinformation, and people are considered militant nationalists for positions that their grandparents took for granted.
Is that a stage of liberalism? Because I thought it was liberalism being skinsuited by authoritarianism due to the three generation effect (in case it has a proper name, I mean where the first generation needs something so they build it fit for purpose, the second generation maintains it but doesn't need it, and they care about it only in the sense of shutting their parents up, and the third generation has never seen the problem it fixed, don't understand it and throws it away).
Repression tends to be a stage in the history of any doomed movement. Once it becomes clear that the ideology itself is failing, those who want to keep the movement alive tend to use repressive tactics and authoritarian techniques to keep the system hobbling along for as long as possible. Which is about what’s happening here.
But the same happened in the decline of other movements as well.
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