Then there's the impact of Big Tech on postmodern life

I've run across two pieces in the last two days that, taken together, raise some unprecedented questions.

One is a deep dive at Wired by Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein about how Mark Zuckerberg has been changed by the crucible of events swirling around Facebook. It's full of vignettes that make clear the nature of that crucible.

The first is about an employee who took screenshots of some social-activism and anti-Trump messages taht went out internally, sent them to an old friend at a tech-news site and was confronted about it by Facebook's head of investigations. (Can you imagine, say, the woodworking shop in your town, or the metal-plating shop down the block needing an "investigations" department?) Needless to say, the guy was fired.


There are interesting accounts of Rupert Murdoch hinting to Zuckerberg, at a pow-wow of media bigwigs in Sun Valley, Idaho, that an antitrust investigation might be in the offing, as well as some eye-opening examples of how false-information scammers use trending memes and other indicators of who supports what to stir up trouble.

Another one that tells us much about the political and cultural state of modern America is a meeting Facebook arranged with an array of right-of-center thought leaders. Ostensibly - and, no doubt, to some extent, among the actual motivations for convening it - it was an expression of concern that a big swath of the public perceived a left-tilting bias at Facebook. But they wanted the makeup of the attendees diverse, because the plan was to get them into a spat:

Facebook decided, too, that it had to extend an olive branch to the entire American right wing, much of which was raging about the company’s supposed perfidy. And so, just over a week after the story ran, Facebook scrambled to invite a group of 17 prominent Republicans out to Menlo Park. The list included television hosts, radio stars, think tankers, and an adviser to the Trump campaign. The point was partly to get feedback. But more than that, the company wanted to make a show of apologizing for its sins, lifting up the back of its shirt, and asking for the lash.

According to a Facebook employee involved in planning the meeting, part of the goal was to bring in a group of conservatives who were certain to fight with one another. They made sure to have libertarians who wouldn’t want to regulate the platform and partisans who would. Another goal, according to the employee, was to make sure the attendees were “bored to death” by a technical presentation after Zuckerberg and Sandberg had addressed the group.

The power went out, and the room got uncomfortably hot. But otherwise the meeting went according to plan. The guests did indeed fight, and they failed to unify in a way that was either threatening or coherent. Some wanted the company to set hiring quotas for conservative employees; others thought that idea was nuts. As often happens when outsiders meet with Facebook, people used the time to try to figure out how they could get more followers for their own pages.

Afterward, Glenn Beck, one of the invitees, wrote an essay about the meeting, praising Zuckerberg. “I asked him if Facebook, now or in the future, would be an open platform for the sharing of all ideas or a curator of content,” Beck wrote. “Without hesitation, with clarity and boldness, Mark said there is only one Facebook and one path forward: ‘We are an open platform.’” 

As I say, it's lengthy, and there's much more of importance in it, but the last two paragraphs sum up its gist succinctly:

 . . . people who know him say that Zuckerberg has truly been altered in the crucible of the past several months. He has thought deeply; he has reckoned with what happened; and he truly cares that his company fix the problems swirling around it. And he’s also worried. “This whole year has massively changed his personal techno-­optimism,” says an executive at the company. “It has made him much more paranoid about the ways that people could abuse the thing that he built.”

The past year has also altered Facebook’s fundamental understanding about whether it’s a publisher or a platform. The company has always answered that question defiantly—platform, platform, platform—for regulatory, financial, and maybe even emotional reasons. But now, gradually, Facebook has evolved. Of course it’s a platform, and always will be. But the company also realizes now that it bears some of the responsibilities that a publisher does: for the care of its readers, and for the care of the truth. You can’t make the world more open and connected if you’re breaking it apart. So what is it: publisher or platform? Facebook seems to have finally recognized that it is quite clearly both.

Then there's Michael Walsh's latest at PJ Media, entitled "Time To Break Up the Big Four." It starts thusly:

Back in July, in this space, I warned about the dangers of the emerging tech monopolies, principally the weaponizing of Amazon via its ownership of the Washington Post.

In the background, but very much part of the conversation, is Amazon's engorgement on the  The Washington Post company, a once-honored (Watergate!) news organization that Amazon boss Jeff Bezos essentially bought for parts -- the main part being the still-influential newspaper in the Imperial City of Washington, D.C. This isn't so much of a financial investment as a form of protection money -- although  Bezos had the chutzpah recently to whine about the deleterious effect of Google and Facebook on print's advertising base, and to make a pitch to the U.S. government for anti-trust protection.

Needless to say, a lot of readers begged to differ, citing the big, big savings and ease of shopping Amazon provides. At the same time, however, Amazon is keeping tabs on you, monitoring your purchases, pushing other products on you and, in the form of the hideous Alexa, listening in on you while you sleep. Throw in the electronic snooping of Facebook, Google and your iPhone, and we're heading for an Orwellian nightmare  . . . 

Walsh minces no words in depicting what he sees as sociocultural havoc being wreaked on an unprecedented scale:

Big Tech has effectively ripped the heart out of the journalism, publishing, music, and entertainment industries but, even worse, it's demolished the ranks of both corporate middle-management and entry-level service jobs, and crushed commercial real estate and retail shopping malls, all for the enrichment of a very few. It's even eliminating  supermarket checkout cashiers. So don't give me the "creative destruction" argument here --do we really want to turn into a Latin American country of caudillos and peasantry? A nation ruled by geeks and government bureaucrats (the only middle-management careers left, apparently)? And you wonder why you have to work three jobs to be able to afford that Prime membership and the latest $800 iPhone.

His argument is that a time has arrived, much as it did at a certain point in the railroad industry's evolution, or when the public realized that Ma Bell was an unchallenged monopoly, to get government involved precisely for the sake of the free market.

There is a host of issues here - who controls the dissemination of information, personal privacy, monopolization of particular economic sectors, to name a few - but the bottom line is that what we are seeing is what happens when a burst of human ingenuity cannot possibly have as a component sufficient foresight of the consequences of acting on that ingenuity to grapple with questions that are going to arise.

This isn't about a clean divide between right and left or good and bad. It's about how society can stay on top of the impact of technological permeation of everything.

I guess left and right do enter into it to some degree. The conservative take is that any such staying on top must be done with a bias against collective action.

But who knows what we'll have to be taking action in response to right around the next corner?