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An Unelected Monarch Is Shaping Our Public Life. His Name Is Mark Zuckerberg
- mc32 6y agoOddly, we don't hear about the other "monarch": Dorsey.
- war1025 6y agoTwitter is a much more niche product in my experience. Everyone and their literal grandmother is on Facebook. Twitter is mostly restricted to news junkies and the tech crowd.
- mc32 6y agoIn terms of shaping public perceptions though, because the media feed from its trough it has oversized influence --I think bigger than facebook. Like, you don't hear about outrage mobs from Facebook as you do from Twitter.
- krapp 6y agoThat was true until the President of the most militarily and financially powerful nation on Earth used it as his a de facto means of communicating government policy and personal opinion. Now, unfortunately, Twitter matters.
- m0zg 6y agoOr Pichai, or Cook. All control considerable swaths of public life. Pichai, arguably, controls a larger swath than Zuck, since he gets to control what results you see when you search on Google, and most people still haven't caught on that Google results are manipulated and therefore no longer authoritative. But it's not odd at all. Zuck has been the only one to offer a tiniest bit of resistance to cultural Marxism and cancel culture. And he succeeded. The shadow cabal can't have that.
- krapp 6y ago"Cultural Marxism" is an anti-semitic conspiracy theory, and cancel culture is just a form of popular internet activism. There's no "shadow cabal" at work here .
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago> "Cultural Marxism" is an anti-semitic conspiracy theory How so?
- m0zg 6y ago> "Cultural Marxism" is an anti-semitic conspiracy theory Your opinion on this is noted. But it's not "antisemitic" or a "conspiracy theory" in the least. CM is basically identity politics, abolition of nuclear family, and other commie bullshit like that. If you're denying the existence of that in today's discourse, I'm not sure what to tell you.
- Skeletor 6y agoWell, we all vote when we use Facebook (or don't use Facebook)
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- jldugger 6y agoSurely, it's not a monarchy until he hands the company over to his eldest son. This is just vanilla plutocracy.
- CincinnatiMan 6y agoA lot of words to convey that Zuck has a lot of power due to his ultimate oversight on content presented on Facebook. Interesting concept at least. Kind of scary.
- tobltobs 6y agoEverybody who is dumb enough to use his crap is electing him. Monarchs do force you to obey, nobody is forced to use FB.
- ehvatum 6y agoI voted for him in 2005, when I started using Facebook. Since then, user base has grown substantially. There was even a movie about Z-Berg. We’re all aware that using Facebook empowers this diminutive, oddly humanoid unit. I think it’s all very charming, and it couldn’t really be any worse than putting faith in ultra-consolidated corporate media. At least this way, people are mislead by their own shortsighted group-think, rather than outsourcing it to an NYC boardroom.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> diminutive This is personal abuse based on the way he looks. Why are you doing that?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> and it couldn’t really be any worse than putting faith in ultra-consolidated corporate media A lot of the media hate for Facebook is driven largely by jealousy over losing their influence on society.
- ben_w 6y agoBeen thinking about this in various contexts recently: if corporations wield enough power to be country-like [0], would it be fair to say they can only be democratic if the workers have the power to elect and replace the board of directors? [0] not necessarily in all regards: “monopoly on violence” will be absent, but having the power to define rules and ban sub-communities or to actually negotiate with governments rather than just do what they are told
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> if corporations wield enough power to be country-like [0], would it be fair to say they can only be democratic if the workers have the power to elect and replace the board of directors? That seems like the wrong model. The power that we are worried about them exercising is over their users and the general public, not their workers. Your statement is like saying government workers should be able to vote who runs government because it is so powerful. The people we are worried about is the general public, not the workers.
- clairity 6y agoanti-suffragists tried to make those kinds of arbitrary distinctions too. a democracy doesn't need to be narrowly defined by its workers. as a company grows, its stakeholders grow to encompass more and more of the public. so especially for large companies, that distinction is immaterial. a democracy should be composed of the affected, not just some aribirarily-defined in-group.
- ben_w 6y agoAs a UK citizen living in Germany, I am worried about the power that America and China have over my future. I can be worried about both despite saying that one looks like a democracy and the other does not, even though I have no say over the government of either, and “customer” feels like it maps to “where exports go”.
- krapp 6y agoA corporation with enough power to be country-like would have to, somehow, claim a monopoly on violence almost by definition. That's really the only thing that would make them "country-like." And it wouldn't be unprecedented. The British East India Company was a defacto state of its own, and companies have been known to employ mercenaries like the Pinkertons or local warlords to enforce coercion through violence on their behalf. But to answer your question, no, I don't think it would, because a company has a more direct coercive role over their employees than governments have over most of their citizens. Companies can fire their employees more easily than democratic governments can arrest or kill their citizens. The infrastructure for surveillance within a company can also be far more pervasive and fine-grained than with governments, simply because the scale is smaller.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoWhat is interesting is how much power the owners of the newspapers in the past had. William Randolph Hearst of "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war" literally got America involved in the Spanish-American War. More recently, the NY Times was a big proponent and probably helped drive a lot of the consensus that got America involved in the war in Iraq. Compared to these, where Zuckerberg is not actually pushing an opinion but refusing to censor opinions, Zuckerberg is an amateur. I think a lot of the hate that Facebook gets is from the old media that are seeing their influence wane and are blaming Zuckerberg.
- clairity 6y agowhile i don't immediately agree with everything you said, you raise an interesting point about the power dynamics of old and new media, and i find it disheartening that it's being buried rather than discussed. at least you spent more than 2 seconds formulating a response, which is more than most on this thread.
- keenmaster 6y agoThis reminds me of a comment I made a while ago on Facebook and the necessity of moderation: "~Thought exercise~: Let's say you were the mayor of a large city. There are multiple areas in the city where you can shout whatever you want during certain hours. Would you let someone hook up an internet-connected megaphone in each area and pipe in hate speech everywhere simultaneously? And what if we were in a future where there were physical bots indistinguishable from humans that crowded into those public spaces, vociferously indicated their agreement, and cheered him on? That future is now. In reality, Facebook owns those public spaces. No one actually goes to that spot in the park anymore. Mark Zuckerberg is the mayor. Oh, and it's not just one city, he's everyone's mayor, everywhere. If you don't use Facebook but you're on Whatsapp, you're still in his jurisdiction. As for the "during certain hours" part? Nope, those internet-connected megaphones are blasting 24/7. Those bots are nodding their heads 24/7. Our mayor also collects megaphone usage fees for himself. He gives you dopamine points, likes, and social validation each time you come back for more. Freedom, yeah." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22206155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22206155
- Deely123123 6y agoOk. Lets enlarge youre analogy. So, its ok to censorship any public speach?
- keenmaster 6y agoThat's a big jump from what I said. Here's an expansion of what I said, in my own words. The only people who wielded the "massive megaphone everywhere" before the advent of social media were traditional media organizations (and organizations with disproportionate access to traditional media). These media organizations were relatively professional, with relatively high standards for reporting. They undoubtedly had biases which led to problematic filtering and distortion of the information that they presented. However, with the democratization of media comes to new problems. We no longer have a professional class synthesizing and filtering the information that we see. Any one of us can wield the massive megaphone now, but there is a huge heterogeneity in that usage. The most passionate partisans, the most nefarious nation states, the Dunningest of Dunning-Krugers,...will use the megaphone the most. Since most people are at least somewhat impressionable, this presents a problem. Whereas before the media would impress upon people with (somewhat problematically) filtered information, now social media is impressing upon people with radically unfiltered garbage misinformation. We have to admit that this is an existential problem for our democracy. Only then can we begin to solve it. I am not asking for mass-censorship. I am asking for the system of social media to be redesigned in such a way to mitigate the above problems.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoI deleted Facebook years ago and Zuckerberg has had little effect on my life since. I don’t seem to remember citizens being able to unsubscribe from Louis XVI or the Romanovs.
- teachrdan 6y agoTrue. But, if you're a US citizen, you live in a country where the President is elected in no small part due to his efforts.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoUnlikely. Certainly a minute fraction of the efforts of the mainstream media (Fox, CNN, etc.)
- anm89 6y agoCongratulations, you've discovered the existence of media in a society with free speech.
- anm89 6y agoNo you don't understand! He has complete control over your life. He plays puppet master with your very life at every moment! At least I heard some populist say that so I'm sure it must be true.
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- anm89 6y agoIt's amazing how words work. If you use a word to mean a thing that is directly in opposition to its original meaning, you can form sentences that sound bad without worrying about reality.
- sloshnmosh 6y agoMark Z should be in a federal prison for treason. He gave low-level access to users social media data to TCL/Alcatel that has ties to the Chinese State and was recently discovered to be behind a massive spyware operation producing malicious Android apps that further exploited American citizens to send their data back to China. Facebook has also recently partnered with the phone manufacturers that were given out to the poor and disabled through the government funded Lifeline program that has also been found to contain unremovable rootkits that install malicious apps remotely and send user data back to China. Mark Z is a traitor and a threat to democracy worldwide.
- true_religion 6y agoI am not sure what you think treason is but it is not merely working with a company from a foreign country that has been named "most favored trading partner" for 20+ years.
- freeopinion 6y agoZuckerberg was elected in one of the most democratic processes possible. Voting is a very fascinating topic. If a person publicly endorses the mayor of Miami (or the CEO of Pepsi, or the President of Ohio State University) for President of the US 2020, many will criticize that person for throwing away their vote. Then half the country laments what terrible leadership we have, and how did these bozos get elected? It's always the fault of the other half. Well, you have more liberty to vote about Facebook than you have to vote US2020. Just log off and never go back. Otherwise, don't complain about not getting a vote. If you did log off and never went back, complaining is kinda like always blaming the other half for the bozos in office.
- pritovido 6y agoWell, he has been elected, people has chosen to use facebook. I don't use facebook because I don't want all my private info controlled by an external company. But most people has chosen to use it, and have chosen to continue using it because the pros outweigh the cons for them. The first monarch is usually elected. The offspring are the unelected.
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- ykevinator 6y agoAll monarchs are unelected
- quotemstr 6y agoNot true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_monarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elective_monarchy