The Future & Not The Future: Microsoft, Wang Huning, Weapons of Mass Distraction and Mass Destruction
Why both backing OpenAI and the Activision acquisition represent a huge error for Microsoft
If you’re a reader of mine you know I’ve been arguing very strongly against Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision on national security grounds and not just your run of the mill antitrust concerns, real though those no doubt are.
So, naturally, I’m overjoyed to see that the Federal Trade Commission has sued to block the Microsoft and Activision. I believe my precise words at the time were, “Whoa!” followed by “Uncle Joe Biden’s really going to fix the tech problem, huh.” OK then! Who knew that the greatest president of my lifetime would be the first octogenarian?
Ever since I was compelled to move to strongly encouraged to move to Northern Virginia, I’ve bumped up against our wondrous government in all its oddities and found myself, like many a helpful nerd before me, being drafted into the wonkocracy. As in high school, so too in government. “The homework must get done!” I say and begin, once again, doing the proverbial jock’s homework lest he give me a swirly or worse tell me I’m uncool and cancel me. We all do our part here in the nation’s Imperial City.
Well, apparently some of this Substack’s readers work at, or are adjacent to, the FTC and they have reached out for research about Chinese agent Steve Wynn’s backing of Bobby Kotick and Bobby Kotick’s romantic ties to Chisraeli agent Sheryl Sandberg.
Activision flack Lulu Cheng Meservey’s tweetstorm has it “The FTC’s job is to protect consumers, not competitors” but that’s precisely what the FTC is doing — protecting consumers. Indeed the policy ought to be about raising prices around addictive things. We have sin taxes for alcohol and cigarettes; we ought to have them for digital products which are harmful too. (Full disclosure: I know Lulu a little bit and wish her well — and other employment. Remember friends, you don’t have to take the naughty money!)
So I was recently asked by a three letter agency’s counterintelligence division what I thought of the Activision deal.
I sketched some of the following points:
The dynamics present in Netflix aren’t quite the same thing with a Game Pass. Netflix offers wholesome content and was instrumental in reducing the money laundering that plagued the film industry. The rise of Netflix and the reduction of profits in the film industry is precisely what led to the destruction of Harvey Weinstein. (He wasn’t making money anymore when the complaints started.)
Of course consumers of games may well like the merger but addicts don’t get a vote. We shouldn’t be trying to lower video game prices. We should be trying to raise them.
China calls video games “spiritual opium.”
I’ve read the talking points from Activision and Microsoft and find them laughably lacking. The notion that somehow Chinese Tencent will benefit from a crackdown in America doesn’t seem likely in an environment where China and America are decoupling. Couldn’t America ban Tencent like it has Huawei? Or couldn’t Uncle Sam ask that Tik Tok behave as it does in China?
There’s a lot to be said about reading Wang Huning — arguably the most powerful intellectual in China — and taking him seriously. These soft power initiatives by China to shape the ideological battlefield and force the closing of the American mind through endless distractions deserve careful attention.
Fortunately you can read all about them in the writings of Wang Huning as summarized in Palladium. (Careful with Palladium, though, dear reader! Read with care—and caution! It’s backed by the Peter Thiel, who suspiciously paid to translate the work of Huning in the book, America Against America (2022). Only after January 6th did Chinese sales of Peter Thiel and Blake Masters’s book, Zero to One, drop off. Remember that both Thiel and Masters lived in China while Thiel was lecturing there.)
Anyway, here’s a relevant account of the importance of Wang’s work:
According to a leaked account by one of his old friends, Xi has found himself, like Wang, “repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveaux riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution.” Wang has now seemingly convinced Xi that they have no choice but to take drastic action to head off existential threats to social order being generated by Western-style economic and cultural liberal-capitalism—threats nearly identical to those that scourge the U.S.
This intervention has taken the form of the Common Prosperity campaign, with Xi declaring in January that “We absolutely must not allow the gap between rich and poor to get wider,” and warning that “achieving common prosperity is not only an economic issue, but also a major political issue related to the party’s governing foundations.”
This is why anti-monopoly investigations have hit China’s top technology firms with billions of dollars in fines and forced restructurings and strict new data rules have curtailed China’s internet and social media companies. It’s why record-breaking IPOs have been put on hold and corporations ordered to improve labor conditions, with “996” overtime requirements made illegal and pay raised for gig workers. It’s why the government killed off the private tutoring sector overnight and capped property rental price increases. It’s why the government has announced “excessively high incomes” are to be “adjusted.”
And it’s why celebrities like Zhao Wei have been disappearing, why Chinese minors have been banned from playing the “spiritual opium” of video games for more than three hours per week, why LGBT groups have been scrubbed from the internet, and why abortion restrictions have been significantly tightened. As one nationalist article promoted across state media explained, if the liberal West’s “tittytainment strategy” is allowed to succeed in causing China’s “young generation lose their toughness and virility then we will fall…just like the Soviet Union did.” The purpose of Xi’s “profound transformation” is to ensure that “the cultural market will no longer be a paradise for sissy stars, and news and public opinion will no longer be in a position of worshipping Western culture.”
Many of the major American tech companies are banned in China but one is not — Microsoft. Indeed Microsoft has continued to enjoy a rather close relationship with Beijing, a relationship which began all the way back in 1992.
China booster Tom Friedman lays it out in The World Is Flat (2007):
Think about all the Chinese working at Microsoft. How likely do you think it is that China had infiltrated the company?
In happier days David Kirkpatrick wrote about Bill Gates’s tour of Microsoft’s China facilities also back in 2007.
No other Fortune 500 CEO gets quite the same treatment in China. While most would count themselves lucky to talk with one of China's top leaders, Gates will meet with four members of the Politburo on this four-day April trip. As one government leader put it while introducing Gates at a business conference, the Microsoft chairman is "bigger in China than any movie star." Last spring President Hu Jintao toured the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., and was feted at a dinner at Gates' home. "You are a friend to the Chinese people, and I am a friend of Microsoft," Hu told his host. "Every morning I go to my office and use your software."
How then shall we take how Chinese Microsoft is? Very Chinese and you might have noticed Bill Gates parroting the talking points that sound eerily like effective altruism. You might also note that he was a big booster of zero covid. You might then wonder if, perhaps, China wants us distracted on the far future while they move on the present while stealing all the past work. They want us insecure and Microsoft helps with that too.
My problem with Microsoft increasingly is that it doesn’t seem to take its security seriously. See generally Nicole Perlroth’s book, They Tell Me This Is How the World Will End: The Cyberweapons Arms Race (2021) and how a lot of Microsoft products seem to have an awful lot of holes in them. Who put them there and why? It’s also terrifying how much of our government operates on completely vulnerable Microsoft products, coupled with COVID and Zoom…
Ultimately this cavalier approach to espionage will destroy Microsoft as other players offer better products like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services, products which are more secure and more deep-state friendly. In keeping with that, note that the $9B cloud computing contracts for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability were awarded to Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle instead of only Microsoft as was initially done during the Trump presidency.
How Oracle was able to get such a contract when its founder, Larry Ellison, was on the call with those plotting to overthrow the government, I can’t say. Given how close Ellison is to the Chinese, I’d think that a security review would preclude Oracle from getting contracts from the DOD. You might wonder if, perhaps, Microsoft and Oracle are how you say PROMIS.
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Among the most frustrating things of our time is how many of the people in tech don’t really believe in technology. They believe in addiction and its cousin — distraction. It’s awfully suspicious that Open AI’s alleged growth was compared to other massively distractions — Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Netflix. See generally Microsoft board member Reid Hoffman’s guide for investing in the Seven Deadly Sins.
But technology should be about making people’s lives better. I’ve argued this elsewhere. It’s not useful for its own sake. The writer Richard Hanania points out all the hilarious ways in which OpenAI’s chat bot seemingly sides with the politically correct outcome. How funny! How pathetic!
Hanania’s mockery reveals something deeper about how much of Microsoft (and the rest of the tech industry) is working. It’s terribly boring and filled with non-playing characters.
So why is the company which gave us Microsoft Works giving us things which make us lazier? How did Microsoft lose its way? I suspect it was deliberately misdirected. Its Indian-born CEO Satya Nadella doesn’t really seem to care what happens to the consumers who depend on Microsoft being helpful and useful. Nadella’s obsession with consolidating
If the Activision deal is denied, I suspect we’ll see Nadella shown the door. Good. He should take others with him. Yes, we need to have a conversation about the anti-woman bad behavior of Brad Smith and his subordinates, notwithstanding his good guy self-presentation and denial of the importance of facial recognition to score PC browny points. You can tell how Chinese a company is by how anti-facial recognition it is — can’t erode China’s monopoly there! — and Microsoft is no different after it divested itself from helping to build Israeli facial recognition firm AnyVision.
Microsoft doesn’t quite have a compelling future either. Not even OpenAI lives up to the hype.
A friend recently asked me “Is OpenAi a weapon?” Maybe. After all, what better weapon is there than this? A malarkey generator directed deep at the heart of America — a very lonely nation. At a party recently a Silicon Valley friend fretted about the AI and how he was worried that people would wind up being to draw in by chat bots which complete them in ways women could not. I suggested to him that we are a lonely world. Let’s not forget that Wang Huning knew we are a lonely country—very individualistic. We turn to Google for questions about God, even.)
But I think there’s something sadder going on. I think it’s good chat bot designed to waste time. It’s “a toy, not a tool,” in Ian Bogost of the Atlantic’s formulation. Skynet, this ain’t.
Still, it’s worth recalling that Elon was himself involved with Open AI once upon a time. Could Open AI flood Twitter with bots in a colossal time suck? Musk’s already allowing foreign agents all over Twitter and Tesla.
Philosophically I oppose black boxes. Practically they ought to be interrogated massively, perhaps by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). I’m sorry, but after Ubiome and Theranos I’m not taking any claims at face value. Are we so sure that Palantir or Anduril could stand up against inquiry? Would the Boring Company? Not if the Wall Street Journal is to be believed.
And the artists and others who have had their work cannibalized by OpenAI have a point. But Charles, Charles, Charles, didn’t you back Clearview.AI? Clearview.AI is arguably operated in the public good — the very notion of which seems to elude a lot of the tech founders.
I suspect that whatever we call it — ChatGPT or GPT-3 — there are so many non-playing characters and that those non-playing characters essentially do meaningless work. How many of us really are automatons anyway?
Nassim Taleb’s observations of the Reverse Turing test strikes me as fundamentally true.
We are starved for practicality — for inventions that matter, for significance. Those aren’t the kind of things that Silicon Valley funds, though. Are they the sorts of thing Microsoft might fund?
I don’t quite believe the Great Stagnation thesis but if I did, I might ask who is to blame for addicting a generation of young people.
To my mind the fury and fear over mass destruction of my teens and twenties has given way to a much more pernicious threat in my thirties— mass distraction, stealing from us the will to do interesting things. Bin Laden united the country for a moment. But Osama Bin Laden is dead and Open AI lives (sort of).
Perhaps the problem starts at the elite institutions which have fallen to Sinification. The rot is all over academia, most recently at Stanford where its president is being investigated over scientific fraud.
Open AI is a weapon, cluttering up the Internet, wasting energy, producing little.
How exactly will Open AI’s chatGPT monetize anyway?
Maybe it’s an op, designed to get you to suspend your thinking.
Maybe we spend way too much time talking about artificial intelligence and not enough stopping natural stupidity.