The Case For Protecting The Kids (and Everyone Else) on The Internet
How and why Big Tech fails us and what's to be done about it...
TLDR: Tech companies which don’t concern themselves with protecting and fostering humane communities do not deserve to exist. And over time they will not.
I recently visited a friend in San Francisco in one its tonier parts — Sea Cliff.
With its awe inspiring views of the Golden Gate bridge and the white sands of Stinson Beach I can see why the homes fetch some of the highest prices of anywhere in the country and why so many tech moguls make it if not their only home the certainly a part of the portfolio.
I had a friend with me who had never been to San Francisco and she and I marveled how it was that there were so many homeless people and so many billionaires so close to one another. The contrast reminded her of her native Brazil and we darted around the city in my convertible with Texas plates. (I am on a long road trip that began some weeks ago.)
“This place has demon energy,” she said. And I agreed, saying. “Everything and everyone in San Francisco is beautiful at a distance but up close you wonder if it’s worth it.”
How could the elites of San Francisco have let this happen? How can it be that there’s such wealth and such high taxes and yet San Francisco is so dysfunctional?
Some, notably Michael Solana of Founders Fund, blame it on the political leadership but I blame it on the business leadership who allow the city to turn to squalor. Perhaps there’s shit in the streets because there are shitty people in the boardroom. There are addict encampments everywhere. “It’s like the Walking Dead,” I said, “but we aren’t allowed to have guns.”
Could this state of affairs be a relic of a mining town where everyone is extracting and no one puts down any roots because they are just passing through? There are no farmers here anymore, nurturing a community.
San Francisco hasn’t lost the feel of a boom and bust town. There’s the immigrants with little history, be they from Shanghai or Cleveland. There’s little investment in the physical infrastructure and one senses that everyone has more or less swapped prospecting for gold with prospecting for information, the new currency of the realm. When you speak to its residents the question is not when they’ll leave but how soon and to where.
And while Star Trek’s San Francisco imagines a gleaming future capital of an intergalactic empire on humanist grounds, Batman would more readily be at home patrolling its streets, gay bars, and dog parks amidst the hypodermic needles.
There is no future in San Francisco. There are few children. Everyone is working on his, her, xe, zer career and body. Nearly everyone on the street has a dog and EarPods in and a vest on. This is not normal.
San Francisco tech is built on addiction and sin — and very conscious of it.
Some of its architects even celebrate how addictive it makes its technology.
One of the more disturbing essays in this vein was one published by the Wall Street Journal by none other than Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn.
In the essay, Hoffman posits that if you really want to make money investing in technology, you need to “tap into one of the seven deadly sins.” Never mind that the wages of sin are death. (Romans 6:23)
The reason you feel bad about your use of technology is that it sold you empowerment when it was actually enslaving you.
Hoffman is a sort of neoliberal Peter Thiel and the two go back to their Stanford days where they debated on public access television. Whereas Thiel had backed Trump Hoffman backed Biden to the tune of millions upon millions of dollars. Why?
You’re not supposed to ask Hoffman about his close personal friendship with none other than Israeli spy and convicted pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, and how they did business together.
Hoffman apologized for helping Epstein launder money into MIT but he has curiously escaped the attention from a larger media, especially as the Epstein connection continues to dog fellow billionaire Leon Black.
Are we really not supposed to notice that Epstein’s purchase of stock? His “curiously nimble trading in LinkedIn stock” right before Microsoft purchased LinkedIn?
Vox’s Teddy Schleifer’s review of a MIT report into Epstein’s relationship with Bill Gates and MIT is curiously absent about Hoffman’s role. It was Hoffman who reportedly introduced Epstein to Gates. The last chapter of Epstein’s life was as a tech investor and he seemingly started right after his conviction. Hoffman also tried to introduce Epstein to Steve Ballmer.
Why do I mention this?
Well, one of things they teach you when you’re an intelligence officer is how to recruit someone against their will, or even without them even knowing it. The more familiar of these frameworks is MICE — Money, Ideology, Compromised, Ego.
Or how I see it: You bribe ‘em, they hate themselves, you get ‘em doing something naughty, or they love themselves and feel slighted. Different countries specialize in different ways of extracting information with some preferring one method to another.
I am particularly interested in how Israeli intelligence operates because the creation of the state of Israel was relatively recent and because their progress shows how much can be done in one lifetime.
I want to be very clear about this: I support the state of Israel, I am a donor to Israeli causes, and I support these rather controversial methods when necessary. State security is paramount. This is not a criticism of the Israeli state. I repeat this is not a criticism of the Israeli state. Au contraire I think American society has much to learn about how to run an intelligence service.
The television series — Inside the Mossad — provides a good example of how the Mossad operates around the world.
So too does the four part documentary series — The Mossad: Imperfect Spies — which details how Jews from around the world, including the United States, were recruited into the clandestine service.
Are Israeli agents operating in the United States? Of course they are.
Are they killing American citizens? Who knows and who’ll dare ask. And why wouldn’t they if those American citizens were an actual perceived threat?
To be fair these Israeli agents might not look like spies or agent provocateurs at all. They might look like children. They might look like your neighbor.
Or they might look like actors or comedians or advocacy groups. What, after all, is Sacha Baron Cohen? Who does he really work for? Why does a comedian have CIA contacts and a robust propaganda operation? Why does he work with the ADL, which itself was linked in one of the largest domestic spying operations in American history? Why is he pressing Mark Zuckerberg to censor Facebook more?
Are we really not supposed to notice the role that Bernie Madoff played after he funded the Southern Poverty Law Center, which itself works with the technology companies to censor American organizations?
It is interesting that among the many victims of Madoff were the American Jewish Congress—a liberal outfit with ties to the Clintons.
And why did Madoff’s people feel he had a chance of a pardon under Trump?
Qui bono?
The best way to compromise someone is to understand his vices, or his sins. And that seems precisely what modern technology is doing. The more we “share” — or is it inform? — on ourselves and our family, the more we are owned.
Information is power and information technology is power at scale. Ah, but with great power comes great responsibilities or does it? Have the nerds who run the Silicon Valley forgotten Uncle Ben’s motto?
The cult leaders elsewhere haven’t. The dueling documentaries about the cult NXIVM are illustrative of this very point. You give up information on yourself — you give up your power — so the cult can use it as collateral, or blackmail so that you might belong. You have the semblance of family without being a family.
What would happen if the executives at these major companies broke bad? If they — and there is reason to believe they might have already with James Damore and during the US election — used their technologies to spy on you?
And how soon would it be before the technologies that are used by nation states, like say NSO Group’s Pegasus which cracks into people’s iPhones, began falling into the hands of the global rich? Has it already? Why wouldn’t it?
Are you really so confident that all the photos from Hunter’s laptop came from his laptop? I’m not. Sure seems like an orgy of evidence on Hunter’s laptop, doesn’t it. How likely would it be that a crackhead would be so organized?
And what about the spearfishing of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s phone by Saudi dictator MBS? Curiously the Bezos story came out in the National Enquirer written by Dylan Howard, the same reporter who broke the story of Epstein’s alleged Mossad ties. Wasn’t Bezos up against the Israeli-led Oracle for the $10B JEDI contract? Indeed he was. Could a divorce for the world’s richest man have blunted his progress at getting his technology into the government? And didn’t it seem as if Howard was trying to extort Bezos? The role of the CIA-linked faction of the mafia in owning and controlling the National Enquirer is well known.
How different would a tyranny where your phone could be cracked by anyone be from a state sponsored one? Could it even be more effective at tyrannizing people?
Monopolies create centralized control and control is what the Big Tech companies want. They fear antitrust and they’ll do anything to buy off any threats. A source of mine at the Wall Street Journal told me that, after the law passed in Australia mandating that the tech companies pay the journalists, they might advertise more money on the Wall Street Journal — if they’d go easy on Google’s shenanigans. The fusion of the tech companies, the media companies, the political interests are well underway—much as it is elsewhere in the so-called autocracies.
We must become like these autocracies if we are to defeat them. So what parts shall we copy and what shall we discard? Hoffman and others make this “Xi or me” argument — that if we regulate Big Tech — we will lose the fight against the Chinese.
I don’t buy it.
Silicon Valley hasn’t done much to make us believe that they are American companies but it seems as if they are post-American. When grilled before the U.S. Senate Mark Zuckerberg was reluctant to say that Facebook’s successes were due to its birth on American soil.
Silicon Valley has done precious little to reduce the Chinese espionage in its midst. Indeed it defends the probable Chinese agents among them as somehow indicative of its high mindedness. That is, if it even notices. Some investors, such as Naval Ravikant, even brag about how their funds made it easier for Chinese money to flow into America.
The first technology company to push back on this sort of thing was Palantir. The mythos around Palantir is that was involved in catching Osama Bin Laden. Was it? Who knows. But it’s a good story. Who — beside the Bush family (ha!) — is on the side of Bin Laden anyway?
Palantir CEO Alex Karp, writing in its S-1s, presents a different possible future where technology companies make America great by making her safe.
“The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software,” Karp wrote. “But they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires. Our company was founded in Silicon Valley. But we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector’s values and commitments.”
…
“Software projects with our nation’s defense and intelligence agencies, whose missions are to keep us safe, have become controversial, while companies built on advertising dollars are commonplace. For many consumer internet companies, our thoughts and inclinations, behaviors and browsing habits, are the product for sale. The slogans and marketing of many of the Valley’s largest technology firms attempt to obscure this simple fact.”
American companies are not welcome in an American city and so there is now a diaspora. Will the increasing stories of technology fuse with the rediscovered America that so many digital nomads have come to explore? Or will they be like the truckers described so memorably in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America, who “cruise over the surface of the nation without being apart of it.”
Time will tell. Ready Player One, quoting Groucho Marx, is right: “I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.” Or fall in love. Or have children. Or die.
In any event and I digress—Palantir has since decamped for Denver. Anduril was started in Orange County by Palmer Luckey, who is a sort of modern Howard Hughes and who was himself fired from Facebook for supporting the Make America Great Again candidate, Donald Trump.
Facebook investor and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel is an investor in facial recognition venture Clearview, based in New York. Genetic discovery startup Othram is based in Texas. The future looks increasingly distributed and free.
While Google’s Eric Schmidt talks a big game about helping the Defense Department in the New York Times he’s simultaneously racking up another passport, oddly to Cyprus.
This sort of behavior is nothing short of treasonous. Which is precisely the behavior you’d expect from the descendant of a Loyalist who fled to Canada. Remember: Ancestry.com provides a great window into the past—and not just your past. All of history may well be simply the choices made within a genealogical constraint.
A better way to envision the tech companies is to think about what the “flips” are to the Seven Deadly Sins. Can you take the fruits of sin and redeem ourselves?
I believe you can.
In Catholicism we confess our sins to our priests and so those sins are washed away. Can sins be watched away when there is a permanent record on the internet? Is this why Google’s right to be forgotten is so appealing? Read So You’ve Become Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson.
For what it’s worth I prefer a right to rebuttal. First they denigrate you, then they deplatform you so you’re defenseless, then they destroy you. But what if you had a right to rebut? Or what if no journalist could have the final say on your reputation? Maybe we wouldn’t fear the permanent record so much.
Let’s take the sins in turn, with especial attention to Hoffman’s 2011 Wall Street Journal essay. I believe we will eventually know enough about ourselves through genetic testing to know which of the sins we are genetically prone to commit. We will help people who struggle with the cross they have to bear by directing them to areas of self-improvement.
Vanity.
Our entrant here is Facebook and Instagram, two companies which monopolies the ad market for the simple reason that they understand what’s most interesting to people is themselves. Vanity’s flip is humility, making yourself a servant rather than vainglorious. This humane, humble solution — Clearview — uses the products of vanity — all those photos on the internet — to keep people safe. Clearview protects the least of these — children, victims of crime — using the byproducts of narcissism. It is shockingly effective, especially at catching the bad guys.
In a health society Clearview would be thanked for its service rather than targeted by anti-cop, antifa-funding corrupt trial lawyers like Loevy & Loevy, or the ACLU, funded by Google.
The Google-funded Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) even defends the “right” of the now defunct Backpage.com to traffic in children to protect the blessed Communications and Decency Act. Yes, this would be funny if it weren't so gross. A law which was meant to keep porn off the internet led to trafficking kids.
Every serious nation state has its own facial recognition service: China’s SenseTime, Israel’s AnyVision, France’s Idemia, Japan’s NEC, and Russia’s Yandex. (China and Russia aren’t allowed to sell to America and Microsoft withdrew its support for AnyVision.)
Why didn’t America have such a service protecting us and securing our safety by making crimes of identity impossible?
Because America’s companies don’t want to work on America’s defense. Google’s Eric Schmidt claimed that his company paused the development of facial recognition in 2011. In Schmidt’s telling facial recognition was supposedly creepy — as if Google ever cared about that or if Schmidt, a notorious womanizer, ever minded being creepy. The truth is that Google doesn’t want to and really can’t build products that make Americans safer and happier; it’s constitutionally unable to do so and will do everything in its power to stop it. They’ve even begun funding legal challenges to disrupt companies that seek to be America first.
Most recently Google has instructed the EFF to come after Clearview. This attack on Clearview by EFF is awkward for a simple reason: Clearview owes its existence to a case the EFF pushed — HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn. (See Camille Fischer and Andrew Crocker, “Victory! Ruling in hiQ v. Linkedin Protects Scraping of Public Data,” Eff.Org, September 10, 2019).
As the EFF rightly notes there is a public right to scrap information. This Ninth Circuit court case established the right to scrap publicly available information on the internet, much to the chagrin of LinkedIn which appealed to the Supreme Court unsuccessfully.
Autocracies are in a much better position to build facial recognition and AI for the simple reason that they can collect data rather quickly. They don’t have to get to the scrappers to work or to deal with bogus lawsuits.
In an ideal world we would build enough trust so that the public voluntarily complied with something like Clearview and that they would maintain their own Clearview identities.
As in the Dark Knight, we might ask ourselves: should one man (or even one company) have all that power? I’d have to say, “No!” David Brin’s The Transparent Society (1998) suggests a different future where the question of who will watch the watchers is answered by the obvious rejoinder: the responsible public. Who will watch the waters? We all will.
You could imagine a Clearview where people provide more information about themselves for even superior products: a Clearview for police, for families, for health workers, and so on.
Have a hard time remembering people’s names at parties? Clearview. Not so sure about that dodgy guy on the dating site? Clearview. Does your grandparent get lost often and forget their names in their advanced age? Clearview.
Allowing users to control what others see about them on Clearview can help make the company more palatable.
The central questions are these: do you have a right to know if the wolf is at your door?
Why, in so many states, do you have a right to a gun but not the right to know who it is before you have to take the shot?
Do we trust our fellow citizens to make good choices? Do we trust ourselves to adequately police them? It is a privilege to be a servant. Ultimately we have to have some humility.
Greed. Robinhood, Coinbase, Stripe. The flip of greed is generosity and Christian love. Think GiveSendGo, an explicitly Christian organization which doesn’t charge usurious fees like the other crowdfunding websites. Rather amazingly GiveSendGo helps the charitable to send prayers. Ultimately crowdfunds become banks. After all, If I give you ten dollars in a week or two you can operate the float. It isn’t well understood how fintech and banking are being disrupted.
Stripe is a very impressive company — worth, supposedly, upwards of +$40B. But Stripe is Wells Fargo’s bitch. While it’s helping “to grow the GDP of the internet,” it does so with Wells Fargo’s sufferance. The next Stripe will help the independent banks grow the local internet GDP of their neighborhoods. Nearly every local business will have an internet component.
Gluttony. UberEats. As more people flee the disorder of the suburbs one could imagine a startup that helps Americans build their own farms in much the same way that Home Depot made industriousness a virtue and a thriving business.
Lust. Tinder, Bumble, Seeking Arrangements. It isn’t a coincidence that the Chinese tried to buy Grindr—it’s an intelligence asset. Who dates who is a question of selection and we have very weak selection now. These latest websites make it easier to hook up and therefore reduce human capital accordingly. There isn’t yet a website that encourages or celebrates human pairings. There’s no “arranged marriage” app. Instead we are left with the ultimate fruit of lust — rape. Tragic as rape is, we can use those rape kits and match them against genetic databases to help catch the criminals. That’s the business model of Othram, a promising new company which has already solved murders and rapes around North America.
Envy. Here again, we have Facebook and Instagram. We can return to that analysis here.
Sloth. Gaming is a great way to learn but it can also lead to a man being on the couch. Perhaps the same technology that enabled sloth could be repurposed in the right context. Oculus’s ability to map a fictional 3-D world gave us the technology for mapping the real world in the form of Anduril.
Wrath. Twitter. Here government regulation may well be needed. The immediate will always win out over the patience. Perhaps this is why we see the proliferation of “mindfulness” apps or claims of meditation by our leaders. A restful mind in a restless world. Who knows how real any of that is.
To think through these types of businesses it helps to have a list of the vices and virtues.
Ultimately we should be asking ourselves what we want more of—and what we want less of. Technology means doing more with less. We can have more virtues and less vices but only if we choose that future. Nothing is on autopilot.
—Charles Johnson
Charlescarlislejohnson@gmail.com