The best commodities
There has been lots of talk of Mark Zuckerberg bending the knee to Donald Trump and a lot of nonsense as well. Here's my take.
First: Zuckerberg is not bending the knee. That would suggest that he had been in any measurable way interested in “a lively exchange of ideas on social media.” He was not and he is not. The fact checking was a fig leaf to pretend that he was “concerned,” the community notes idea is gosammer bullshit (cf. Harry Frankfurt) .
Zuckerberg has always been a tech bro without scruples, without defining qualities (yes, I am referring to Musil), without contour. He has never taken an iota of responsibility for the impact of his platform. He had one idea of how to make money once, and he went for it, obviously without ever considering the real social consequences. As a billionaire, now, he knows that he is unassailable in the current celebritocracy. Sure, occasionally Congress makes a spectacle of showing the world what a shivering little boy he is. But wouldn’t you embarrass yourself for billions and billions of dollars?
Essence de Meta
Zuck’s business is in fact no different from that of any big company trading in commodities. In the world of finance, a commodity is defined (cf. Investopeodia) as
“…. a basic good used in commerce that is interchangeable with other commodities of the same type. Commodities are most often used as inputs in the production of other goods or services.”
For people like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and many more, you are not a human being. You are the commodity. You are the mark. Trump is a genius at making his voters feel he cares. Just like the televangelists make their flock believe that by buying him a private jet, god will heal them of their pyles.
For Zuckerberg, humans are essentially like potatoes, crude oil, rice, wheat, corn, or cotton, but with an amazing benefit: Commodities usually have to be planted into, or extracted out of, the earth or the oceans, and then processed. It’s costly, time-consuming, often risky. In the Meta model (this applies widely to the online universe), the commodities congregate all by themselves, with a smile on their faces, with pictures of their vacations, their cats, their jokes, something weird and comical, sometimes their feelings, or the seminars they are selling, their little confabs, and darkly, their political views, their hallucinations, their conspiracy theories.
Potato revolt
I hear that potatoes are getting jealous. They end up mashed, fried, chopped, eaten, digested, and defecated. And they then need to be replaced. You — we — are the ideal commodity. We just keep on feeding the machine, and get put into special bags by an algoritm and sold in bulk over and over and over again to advertisers, to politicians, to scammers of all shapes and size. In the process, we are getting confused about what is real and what is fake.
Emotion expressed the way a shotgun expresses pellets is the fertiliser for this commodity. Because we like to react, and thanks to little drawings, we can react so easily, and that means greater sale potential of our inner self to hearing-aid manufacturers, fly-by-night companies that tell you in English that their device is taking the country you live in by storm…. It takes less than a second to click on the emoji, and we are happy for our engagement, our compassion, for our anger expressed, or our exploading head. You post the picture of a beautiful old horse: hearts. Your friend dies, you are sad, you will gather many crying emojis and hugging, whil your body screams for human contact.
But mostly you don’t want to be sad on Facebook. You want to be angry or happy, the former being better for Mark, because someone will be angry back. Happiness gets boring fast. Writing a critical piece like this one is boring. Too long. Too convoluted. My friends know… “He just rants on anyway, gosh, aren’t there a few reels of cats massaging a dog around so I can get back to my bliss? Let me put a heart on it, he’ll be happy, and I can move on…:”
Let me quote from Adorno’s Minima Moralia, chapter 19:
“Technification is making gestures precise and rough now – and thereby human beings. It drives all hesitation out of gestures, all consideration, all propriety [Gesittung]. They, the gestures, are subjected to the irreconcilable – ahistorical, as it were – requirements of things.”
He was referring to physical technology, but isn’t social media “technology?” Isn’t a virtual platform a thing?
And don’t tell me, oh it has always been like this, you are a dotard who dislikes progress. Nonsense. This communication technology is more brutal than all others before it. It has conquered and commodified a previously unreachable space: Your private life, your thoughts, your time, your family. It has built up mobs who live and thrive in walled towns of their own kind. Look: Suicides are up, anger is up, division is up, reason, calm, ease are down. We’ve been speeded up, our lives are accompanied by a Cannibal Corpse percussion line.
The gift that keeps on giving
It's a crazy, brilliant, exploitative, devastating money machine, sort of like the one in Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches on the Beaches… In this amazing world, the laws of supply and demand can’t work anymore. The supply is so large, that demand is amply satisfied. Zuckerberg has hoarded so many megatons of this human commodity, that even if today, 3 million people reading this post (yeah, I am joking, hardly anyone will even see this parenthesis) shut off their Facebook websites, losing years of memory, it would make no difference. You can’t even protest, because the sites are built up to prevent any resistance. It’s free, don’t complain. If you don’tg like it, leave it. my memories are all online. I want to be seen.
Zuck does not care. He’s just made another few billions.
The free speech credo
The Feudal Lords of the Online Empire have a single sales pitch. In an incredible irony, these men, for whom a billion dollars is nothing are hollering from every virtual roof top and to their millions of followers: It’s all about FREE SPEECH!
Ah, yes. And the “Epstein was just protecting all those young girls from being abused by someone else” pitch.
These days, that term is waved about like a flag with special meaning, a magic wand that elevates you into a moral fraternity or sorority, the invincible halo upon thy sacred brow. How dare anyone doubt it. Don’t dare say no, free speech has to be restricted.
Let us spitball (the flock kneels):
Is free speech , for example, passing on the clip by some scammer or purveyor of conspiracy theories and utter bullshit? Imagine I get a magic, always full, compost bucket and distribute the contents to all my neighbors… Is that free speech? What if I say: I am an artist, and this is modern art: DEAL WITH IT.
Does posting a quote misattributed to Einstein or Bertrand Russell or some other intellectual giant constitute free speech? Better yet, does it make the conduit, the poster, an archangel of free speech? I’m not sure.
I believe speech needs to be attached to thought, to deliberations and considerations of what is fact and what is fiction. It demands from the free speaker some form of epistemic responsibility. And by the way, who is controlling the dissemination of that speech? An algorithm, and that algorithm is not programming itself, at least not now (worried emoji).
This discussion needs to be explored by deeper thinkers. Just remember this. Zuck, Musk, and that crowd did not iinvent free speech, and when it comes tme to removing it, they will. In fact, we have always had free speech. But it’s not some sort of floating cloud, like the free speech of one hand clapping or of a tree falling in the forest. As long as well-meaning people hear you, you are not in danger. Same with freedom of expression. It’s all bound up to other aspects of our communication. It can’t be separated. Also involved is, e.g., (( tolerance, which even a full-throated supporter like Spinoza realized had certain limitations.
(But at this point @Charlie58945098 thinks: “Spinoza is an idiot, and his name sounds, like foreign, like Mexican, so a priori he must be wrong, because he wants to eat my cat. And you’re such an elitist egghead for bringing up those elites who thunk. My gut tells me that free speech means I can say what I want… and what about the price of eggs?”)
You see: Free speech is tied up with protection. It’s not the speech, but the person uttering the speech who needs protection. No matter how many tons of TNT I explode on a word, that word, those words, will not go away.
Now let me ask you: In this society where we are constantly heard/listened to and can be doxxed at any time, is our speech free? Worse yet, with AI, anyone can put words in your mouth that you never said and then send it out to the world at large. This can cost you your livelihood, even your life. Consider how many times you wanted to say something, you could have said something, and didn’t, because you were afraid for your safety or your job. Just saying, there are always constraints. But if you are a billionaire, apparently there are none.
Final admonishment
Watch out when tech bros and their political and media surrogates try and sell you on “free speech.” Very few mean it in any deeper sense. I don’t know if I do, but I believe it needs some real exploration, they don’t. They understand that this ochlocratic communication system currently ravaging democracies thanks to social media is financial manna, a raging torrent that produces energy in the form of dollars. For them, only. For the Great Unwashed, me, you, and my neighboprs and loved ones, who grind away at our lives trying to avoid being bad, taking as much responsibility for our plagues and agues, it’s anything but. It robs us of our time, our clear thinking, our ease. We have become trained to read memes and think they are wisdom. We express our feelings in those emojis, we click and type around frenetically, because we are afraid of loneliness, of becoming the savages of Brave New World. But maybe life as a savage is not that bad?
