Be careful what you wish for

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This morning’s Observer column:

In 1996, two US congressmen, Chris Cox (Republican, California) and Ron Wyden (Democrat, Oregon), drafted a law that they felt was essential if the nascent internet was to grow and prosper. The clause they wrote eventually found its way on to the statute book as section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, part of the sprawling Telecommunications Act, which Bill Clinton signed into law in 1996.

Cox and Wyden had been troubled by the rise of libel suits against internet service providers (ISPs) for defamatory content posted on websites that they hosted. The key sentence in the clause that they eventually drafted read: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

This single sentence provided the legal underpinning for how the world wide web has evolved…

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Fake policy — and fake news

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Lovely NYT column by Paul Krugman. He starts by reminding readers of how big the US economy is. It employs 145 million people. And every day, on average, 75,000 people get fired or laid off.

But why am I telling you this? To highlight the difference between real economic policy and the fake policy that has lately been taking up far too much attention in the news media.

Consider, by contrast, the story that dominated several news cycles a few weeks ago: Donald Trump’s intervention to stop Carrier from moving jobs to Mexico. Some reports say that 800 U.S. jobs were saved; others suggest that the company will simply replace workers with machines. But even accepting the most positive spin, for every worker whose job was saved in that deal, around a hundred others lost their jobs the same day.

In other words, it may have sounded as if Mr. Trump was doing something substantive by intervening with Carrier, but he wasn’t. This was fake policy — a show intended to impress the rubes, not to achieve real results.

So why don’t news media put Trump’s fatuous bluster into that kind of context? Search me.

The technocratic delusion

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“This may upset some of my students at MIT, but one of my concerns is that it’s been a predominantly male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around AI, and they’re more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. A lot of them feel that if they could just make that science-fiction, generalized AI, we wouldn’t have to worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us.”

Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab

The network architecture of the alt-right

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This morning’s Observer column:

While there is no single, overarching explanation for Donald Trump’s election, his ascendancy would have been unthinkable in a pre-internet age, for two reasons.

The first is that much of Trump’s campaign rhetoric would never have got past the editorial “gatekeepers” of an earlier era – the TV network owners and controllers, the editors of powerful print media and the Federal Communications Commission with its “fairness doctrine” (which required holders of broadcast licences to “present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was, in the Commission’s view, honest, equitable and balanced”).

The second reason is that in the pre-internet era, the multitudes of Trump’s vigorous, engaged and angry supporters would have had little option but to fume impotently in whatever local arenas they inhabited. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, for them to hook up with millions of like-minded souls to crowdsource their indignation and their enthusiasm for the candidate.

So I think we can say that while the net may not have been a sufficient condition for Trump’s victory, it was definitely a necessary one…

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Backward into the future

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From Gideon Lichfield of Quartz:

Yes, there have been far worse years in history. Yes, it’s in our (and the media’s) nature to give too much weight to bad, short-term news. Sure, you can take solace in the vast longer-term strides humanity has made, or in devil-may-care existential nihilism, or in hopeful bromides—the arc of the moral universe, yadda yadda. Choose your flavor of forced optimism, and indulge in it all you want. By any objective measure, this has still been an awful year.

It’s not just because of Aleppo, Nice, Brussels, Orlando, and other milestones in carnage. Nor because of the rise of Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Fillon, Duterte, and other merchants of hatred. Nor because free trade and movement are on the retreat. Nor even because a newly isolationist US, resurgent Russia, and aggressive China are about to take the world’s geopolitical balance and shake it like a snow-globe.

No: It’s also because this has been the year of post-truth, when the combined effects of polarizing social media, weakening traditional media, shameless politicians, and economic and political tribalism reached their logical destination. In countries whose systems of governance were premised on at least a veneer of reasoned debate about mutually agreed-on facts, the scope for such debate is shrinking fast. This is fundamental. Don’t like the way the world is going? Want to change it? How do you convince people if they won’t even hear you?

So yes; things are bad, and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise. But it’s equally foolish to wallow in despair.

Well, I agree with that last sentence anyway.

Lessons for liberals

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Good Guardian column by Matthew d’Ancona. I particularly like this:

The lesson of 2016 is that you are in a fight, and you lost the first round. This is not the moment for vague “One Nation” rhetoric. It’s a time of political combat – whether you like it or not. Resist kneejerk reaction, but don’t be afraid to take sides. Define your red lines and patrol them assiduously. This is the biggest political scrap since the cold war: autocracy versus democratic institutions; liberalism versus traditionalism; wall-building versus openness. The alt-right, Ukip and Breitbart understand that. Do you?

Spot on.

So what brought the tech moguls to fawn on Trumplethinskin?

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This morning’s Observer column:

On Wednesday, a curious spectacle could be observed in New York. A swarm of tech billionaires arrived in their private jets and were whisked to Trump Tower, the Louis XV pastiche that is the residence of Trumplethinskin, as the tech journalist Kara Swisher calls the president-elect.

The roll call of assembled tech moguls ran as follows: Satya Natella and Brad Smith (Microsoft), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Larry Page and Eric Schmidt (Alphabet, Google’s holding company), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), Tim Cook (Apple), Elon Musk (Tesla), Ginni Rometty (IBM), Safra Catz (Oracle), Chuck Robbins (Cisco), Alex Karp (Palantir) and Brian Krzanich (Intel).

Apart from their vast wealth and an aversion to paying tax, what linked these notables? Answer: a deep loathing of Trumplethinskin. Yet when he issued the summons to his preposterous “summit” they all came running. Why?

Read on

LATER

Most of those attending were tightlipped afterwards Kara Swisher extracted some impressions. She quoted one of the attendees as admitting that it was a bit of a humiliation.

“We definitely gave up a little stature now for possible benefit later,” said one source, noting that it was the price of being a public company with a tweet-happy new U.S. leader. “It’s better to be quiet now and speak up later if we have to, and save our powder.”

Which provides an interesting confirmation of the point I made in the column about the perceived power of a Trump tweet.