All Things Alt-Tech nyman.media

Where we’re going, is to towards a censored, sanitized, corporate, Internet where the Party comes first, and any questioning of the new great leader will be cracked down upon. There is already a good example of what this looks like: China.



According to the Chinese government, what it does is to protect "the safe flow of internet information and actively guides people to manage websites under the law and use the internet in a wholesome and correct way”. Jack Dorsey made an eerily similar statement in the latest senate hearing on Big Tech where he proclaimed that Twitter is seeking to 'ensure civic integrity' and 'prevent the undermining confidence in government'. (Apparently, that suddenly became an issue post-Trump).



Looking to China, where the merger of corporate and state powers in nearly complete, the censorship is more advanced and widespread. Streaming companies need to set up censorship departments and vet all uploaded songs before they can be posted online. They also need to set up systems to punish uploaders of unapproved or illegal content, and blacklist repeat offenders. Come to think of it, YouTube already does that, with their three-strike policy, and with their de-platforming threats. Twitter also frequently demands users delete offending posts so they can resume their activity. So, we’re halfway there!



Chinese obviously censor out unfavorable information, such as documentaries on their grave problems of air pollution — even any discussion around such issues is scrubbed out. This is very similar to the Soviet response to Chernobyl. There could not even be any recognition of there being a problem. Because as we all know all issues go away if you just stop talking about them. Expect similar speech controls to come to a social network and a search engine near you. 



So, what’s so dangerous about a little bit of stifling of free speech, redacting unpalatable truths, stifling conversation, etc? 'Enabling social unity' is exactly what the dems say they want to do these days. Let's look at what happened when the Coronavirus broke out in China. Nobody trusted the Chinese media, or the the narrative that was being told and curated online. You could not even freely communicate about the virus — conversations on messaging apps were being stomped out. Nobody bought the data around cases and deaths, fatality rates, etc. People trusted the organic social media clips more; the ones showing Chinese authorities welding buildings shut or people falling dead in the streets. People suspected that the real truth was being suppressed and trusted the unredacted, anecdotal information much more. 



And, we panicked. The Chinese, as well as the Europeans, and the Americans, and the Asians. I would posit that this would not have happened, had you had an open, honest Internet and a free media in China. Instead, you got a Streisand effect on steroids and complete mistrust, and panic spread like wildfire. Similarly, in the US, because of the stifling of conversation about election fraud, more people will probably believe it. And they will be even more infuriated when they are shadow banned and de-platformed on social media. So, prepare for more conspiracy theories, more distrust and more rage on all fronts. We're going to need a lot of popcorn.



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Yet again, fact is stranger than fiction, as more and more parallels between Big tech and the Ministry of Truth abound. Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, Zuck, and Sundar Pichai were all summoned in front of Congress for another hearing (Twitter and Facebook both decided that the laptop from hell had to be memory holed; hidden from the collective consciousness of America as we entered the election).



Today, we’re still having a debate, as to whether big tech is censoring, influencing, hampering free speech, etc. when it’s obvious that this is happening. Twitter got caught redhanded censoring a critical piece of information from a legitimate news source, at a critical moment in time; a development that would certainly have had a bearing on the election.



The currents situation is reminiscent of 1984: in the dystopian society depicted, there were several ministries in government, one of them is the Ministry of Truth. (Of course, this is a complete misnomer because in reality it serves as the opposite: it is responsible for the falsification of events. They doctored the historical records to show a government-approved version of events).



In actual fact, a sort of Ministry of Truth has actually long ago existed: In 1912, the Soviet newspaper industry created Pravda (which literally means truth). It did not start as a political publication, in fact it was a journal on social life. But Lenin decided that the party needed a voice in the news industry and that Pravda could convey the party line to the people. Again, Pravda had little to do with truth, but it was literally called the truth, in a perfectly Orwellian fashion. 



The Soviet Newspapers were were staffed by journalists who were undereducated and they lacked journalistic skill (in other words, exactly like today). The Soviet Press Corps did strive to raise the standards of the press, but also, had to maintain strong party support from the journalists -- which proved an impossible juxtaposition.



Finally, in the 1930s, the Institute of Journalism threw in the towel, ended its drive for professional journalism and standards, threw out the existing key figures, and government officials revised the entire curriculum to just meet their propaganda goals.



We are at that stage of throwing principles to the wind today. Look at how journalists and the news media behaves, for instance in how they censor uncomfortable stories concerning Hunter Biden, or more recently, how they called Joe Biden as the early winner in several key states (while sitting on Trump’s wins that were even more obvious).



Over a 100 years old, Pravda is still alive to this day, still led by pro-Kremlin editors — but it’s of course but a shadow of its former self. It’s now effectively a tabloid, as that’s what they’ve had to resort to to cling on to some sort of readership. The same thing is happening to the legacy news media in the west. It’s getting ever click-battier and tabloid-like, by the day, while getting further and further away from any semblance of journalism. Looks like history is repeating.



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In the USSR, to maintain the various official government narratives, certain facts, news and entire persons had to be silenced at all cost. In fact, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, one of their first decisions was to limit free speech through censorship, of course all the while claiming they were promoting freedom. In the same year, the Soviet government signed the Degree on Press which effectively prohibited criticism of the Bolsheviks’ authority. Following this event you had 70 years of strangled freedom of expression, and severe punishments for those who dared to speak up.



Undesirable people were removed from literature, and also from photos, posters and paintings. While image retouching is easier these days, outright redactions of images is now more difficult — or?



Back in the USSR, complete censorship was possible because of centralization; because of the top-down structure. All media in the Soviet Union was controlled by the state — television and radio, newspapers, magazine, and book publishing. Today, all media is in the hands of just a handful of corporations — we have a different kind of top-down structure, and therefore, censorship is just as possible. More so, even, because we’re now in a digital world — you can control the flow of information with more precision, and on an individual basis, and you can influence what each individual sees, doesn’t see, or think they see.  (You think you’re seeing a certain consensus; e.g. a majority supporting your favorite candidate/initiative/idea/etc, but what you’re just seeing is a squelched conversation; a curated flow of information).



During the Soviet era, book manuscripts had to pass rigorous approvals processes, and state owned publishing house decided whether or not to publish and distribute a certain book. It wasn’t just political messaging that was throttled, the censorship affected novels and poetry as well. Doctor Zhivago was was banned, as it focused too much on individual characters, and presumably this style of storytelling was not conducive to fostering the collectivist Soviet culture. 



It was not a complete silencing of the dissenting voices though, but rather a selective bottlenecking of certain views and information. Some books which were accepted, for example, such as speeches by Leonid Brezhnev were printed up in huge quantities. Some of the less favored works might be published in limited numbers and just not distributed widely. This is what we would call shadow banning today. It was, and is so machiavellian in that it enables a facade of openness; it suggests that while there are dissenting views, they are few and insignificant (and by extension, if you share these views you are also part of the lunatic fringe).



As more and more Soviet people got their own radio receivers and foreign radio broadcasts became available, this presented a problem for the Soviet apparatchiks, as they obviously couldn’t easily censor foreign broadcasts, let alone live foreign broadcasts. The solution was to install massive radio jamming stations. These were in effect, anti-radios. Of course, even these radio jamming stations were secret — so secret that they had to be redacted whenever they were visible in photographs. 



This type of jamming, we can see today. We see how unfavorable publications are being redacted from newsfeeds and search results, as well as the endless de-platforming efforts. This goes all the way to web hosting providers blocking certain undesirable websites. 



But back in the Soviet Union, the doctoring of photos and pulling books, etc. those are only examples of outright and overt official censorship in Soviet. There was also a secondary type of censorship that arises as a consequence. With enough force and repercussions, the secondary effect of censorship might be self-censorship; a certain self-control by authors themselves.



There were of course, a minority of brave people opposing

Is the economy recovering or deteriorating? Does wearing masks help? Is the virus a life-threatening issue? Do lockdowns work? Is there a working vaccine?



These are fairly straight-forward questions, but you get two decisively different answers depending on your choice of news source. There’s often two different camps to each question -- and what’s the denominator for those two different camps? It’s a political one.



The line of reasoning is totally influenced by politics. The virus was long ago turned into a political football, and so have most other issues of today. Here’s the problem: nobody checks sources or underlying data — in fact there’s no way you can fact check a news report in today’s climate of bitesized news tidbits and tweets. So, when we’re debating or discussing matters based on what we’re fed in the news, we aren’t debating facts at all; we’re comparing brands.



Why is there such disparity in terms of the narratives? Isn’t the news, well, the news? If the networks strived to reach some sort of objective truth, shouldn’t there be more agreement between the various networks? 



Google and Facebook have picked certain channels as authoritative sources. However, there was no billion dollar research study behind this, no efforts to actually determine or validate whether or how much more reliable ABC is than Fox, etc. In other words, they picked their top brands. If you make a decision based on preference, it’s a brand choice, not a strictly rational, fact-based choice; it’s picking Coke instead of Pepsi.



What’s the solution? Take a listen.



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What do most Big Tech companies have in common? Let's see. Uber owns no cars, Airbnb owns no real estate, Facebook has no content of its own, YouTube: owns no videos, Instagram: no images, etc. People who defend the 'zero-asset' model of Airbnb and the others, will stress that building an online business is all about the network effects and providing the infrastructure for users. While there’s some truth to that, what’s common amongst these business is that they strive to ever more centralization, monopolization, knowing that doing so will give you pricing power down the line.



Amazon is owning the entire supply chain and it’s pushing out businesses left and right. No one can compete with Amazon’s retail logistics. Why not? Because Amazon runs those logistics at a loss. It’s all subsidized by its Cloud Computing Business. None of this is good for small business (and it’s not good for big business either). In years past, such antics might be thought of as predatory pricing. That is, running a business unit at a loss, in order to hook customers and drive competitors out of business, only to then raise the prices when the market position is accomplished. This is considered anti-competitive in many jurisdictions and is illegal under some competition laws. Of course, at this stage of the business cycle, laws don’t apply and fraud, anti-competition and insider trading is rampant anyway, so who cares, right?



Normally, the later you are in a mania, the more egregious the fraud becomes. Think about Enron in the first tech bubble. We are now beyond rent-seeking, predatory pricing, we’re now into plain vapor-ware. Now, people are building enormous companies without products altogether. An example of that is Tesla, and the endless stream of non-existent products and features that Elon Musk keeps announcing.



In the first dot-com bubble, people were investing in companies without working products. We laughed at it after the fact — how could anyone be dumb enough to invest money in fictional products, just a story; an empty promise with nothing tangible to assess; not even the crudest prototype? Well now, in this stage of the second bubble, we are back to investing in companies without products. Stories. We’ve come full circle.



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We to go back to dissect the big tech hearing in the us congres, where Bezos, Pichai, Zuckerberg and Tim Cook were summoned and questioned. The big tech leaders knew very well about two core issues at hand: 1. Antitrust: they are, in essence monopolies of their respective spaces, and that’s why they came prepared with canned responses (it’s why they stated their testimonies with their rags-to-riches stories and underscoring how they are self-made and value entrepreneurship). 2. There are the ever-recurring freedom of speech issues and censorship issues. Big tech wants to maintain the option to pursue their bias and censor, while being treated as platforms. 



The US is a great market to be in, if you are an established oligarch, but as the disruptive underdog, not so. We take a look at one of the few companies that have managed to innovate, scale and disrupt, namely Tiktok. Not surprisingly, it looks like it’s going to be banned from US, if it’s not acquired. Do you think Trump should have the right to shut down or force a sale? Take a listen.