The Silicon Oligarchy

I love this new narrative that allowing the president of the USA to communicate on the largest platform in the world is siding with him or being in alliance with him.<p>At least be honest and say that you want Zuckerberg to censor and police trump. That’s the truth. But don’t pretend that somehow it’s immoral to allow the US President to post on your platform. He’s the president, whether you like it or not.

I assume the US has always been an oligarchy and never truly a democracy at the federal level. The American people just get to vote from either the two parties that desire whoever to be elected and where hundreds of millions are spent with a lot of nonsense that&#x27;s off-topic.<p>Understandably tech is arguably in infancy but nothing like the decades before today. So the tech monopolies of today weren&#x27;t a thing before but people had so much opportunity in the earliest years; that resulted in money being easy to be made with little concern of whatever outcome. Nowadays platforms control most of the market and people are now starting to notice an oligarchy in tech. Resulting in concern propagating in recent years.<p>It&#x27;s well known a lot of people in society don&#x27;t have a voice and when they&#x27;re wronged by the system(s) of society; whether it be authoritarian or not. I&#x27;m unsure if we can really prove current day is worse or better than previously in history regarding to having a voice&#x2F;impact when being wronged. My question is how do we justly blame a worse outcome on a tech oligarchy and when we cannot know the foregoing being worse or better than the past?

s&#x2F;Silicon&#x2F;Tech&#x2F;<p>I thought this was going to be about Intel&#x2F;TSMC&#x2F;Samsung&#x2F;GlobalFoundries. There&#x27;s barely any Silicon in the valley anymore.

&gt;a Chinese president gets first dibs on naming Zuckerberg’s kids.<p>That&#x27;s pretty bizarre even by Zuck&#x27;s standards

Bully&#x27;s once they grow up have to adopt a veneer facade of goodness to hide that plain fact that they are still the same. In such cases it&#x27;s usually the actions that speak the truth because the words are always meant to hide greed and sadism.

Please remove what looks like a tracking token from the URL.<p>Untracked URL <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;themargins.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-silicon-oligarchy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;themargins.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-silicon-oligarchy</a>

Tools of the national security™ apparatus and its profiteers repurposed for domestic use[0]:<p>2014 CFR discussion[1]: &quot;… What about Twitter? I have no idea what Twitter is good for. But if it flips out every tyrant in the Middle East, I&#x27;m interested.&quot; - Michael Rogers, Founder, Practical Futurist; Futurist-in-Residence, New York Times Company<p>[0][1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15623278" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15623278</a>

This is why it’s so important to avoid closed software and especially avoid software that depends on network services run by individual companies.

&gt; As the Black Lives Matter demonstrations gained momentum and the police response became increasingly violent, I found myself reliving what Turkey has gone through, but in English.<p>In some cases in these US protests&#x2F;revolts the authorities stepped completely back allowing looters and vandals complete reign over some areas. That&#x27;s the complete opposite of what happened in Turkey.

I&#x27;m not convinced at all that Mark Zuckerberg likes Trump. He just did it to play &quot;good cop bad cop&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve seen this kind of &quot;good cop bad cop&quot; charade a lot recently. Not just in the news but also in real life at my last company. You have one person acting like the bad guy using extreme arguments and another person acting like the good guy using less extreme arguments (though also undesirable) - this encourages people to side with the less extreme position instead of recognizing that they are both undesirable options.<p>IMO the &#x27;employee walkout&#x27; by FB was just a charade in this good cop bad cop game. In a highly divided society, this is the most effective way to persuade people to do what you want. It creates a slow but predictable decline. Within a decade, people will think of the once extreme position as being totally reasonable.<p>Then they will keep playing the game; it&#x27;s going to get a point that the good cop will be offering people to take huge salary cuts while the bad cop will be offering to abolish salaries altogether and provide food vouchers instead. There will be some overhanging narrative that we have limited resources and each one of us should do our bit to conserve those resources.

I had hoped it would be about how there are so very few top-tier fabs.

VECTORALISTS

tl;dr: I&#x27;m from Turkey and &quot;orange man bad&quot;<p>So boring and unoriginal, missing one side completely and spinning it as unbiased, when it&#x27;s borderline propaganda. C&#x27;mon.

&gt;One of my new grand theories is that America lags 5-7 years behind emerging markets when it comes to the impact of American companies on society. And now, whatever heaven and hell tech companies have wrought upon the emerging markets is now on our doorstep.<p>This dovetails quite nicely with my conviction that whatever fortune or misfortune that&#x27;s allowed to visit American blacks will eventually hit the rest of the country. Widespread housing insecurity? Check. Drug epidemic? Check. Voting rights crisis? See you in November.