4

ANCIENT ROMAN BLOCKBUSTER

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ensorship occurs on many levels, but the most dangerous censorship may be that which occurs in secret by the operators of the big digital era information machines.

The search engine Google, like many global corporations, has a public face with a private motive beyond the realm of accountability, which too often than not operates on belated apologies based on inconvenient errors and omissions.

The public face sells the company’s on-line dominance of the Internet with a mantra promoting an open ended free speech that benefits democracy. But privately everything the information gatekeeper does has a financial aspect that is compelled forward by that old capitalist motif of get rich quick, regardless of the consequences.

Spill toxic chemicals in the Red River to make the automobile of today. Generate electricity from nuclear power by boiling water to generate steam that drives turbines that sends electricity to run the bread maker. ‘Eat up’, and worry about the radioactive waste on another day.

Capitalism and democracy go well together when held in balance by competition and government regulations. But oligarchs and monopolies simultaneously skew the end results of the economy and governance, regardless of the publicly stated intentions, because market domination creates absolute power, and absolute power tends to want to control and manipulate, long after getting rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

That element that makes Google so appealing to search engine users also makes Google so dangerous to democracy, because with over half of the world’s Internet traffic, the Internet chat room is not big enough for any criticism. Punishment can be swift with just the slightest tick required by the eTech titan to change the outcome for a business venture, a freedom writer and a user interfacing with family and friends.

PHYSIOLOGICALLY, MAN IN THE NORMAL USE OF TECHNOLOGY (OR HIS VARIOUSLY EXTENDED BODY) IS PERPETUALLY MODIFIED BY IT AND IN TURN FINDS EVER NEW WAYS OF MODIFYING HIS TECHNOLOGY

MARSHAL McLUCHAN

The eTech entrepreneurs pitching a new start up from their 16 gig laptops have a bit of inside adventure in store for them, along with all the risks and unexpected twists and turns that normally occur when trying to survive financially down the road trip of a lifetime through the digital universe.

The business model adapted across on-line platforms begs for reckless abandonment, beginning with the required garage, startup test kitchen, and then accumulating more momentum toward every successive station all along the business growth cycle, continually progressing faster and faster to outdistance a budding competitor.

At the same time, the eTech engine has an insatiable appetite for cash that must be met along the growth curve. Cash flow pays the daily operating expenses, but cash also pays for the expansion of digital architecture into new markets.

BUSINESS MODEL

THE BUSINESS MODEL ADAPTED ACROSS ON-LINE PLATFORMS BEGS FOR RECKLESS ABANDONMENT, BEGINNING WITH THE REQUIRED GARAGE, STARTUP TEST KITCHEN

This infrastructure must be continually upgraded. And then there must also be cash to payback the investors, generated from increased share prices that rise or fall directly in relation to quarterly revenue announcements.

An eTech company may still increase the share value with increasingly higher revenue forecasts even if the balance sheets show a continuous loss of money. That ethical conundrum promoting the shares of a net zero gain company permeates much of Wall Street, with shares ultimately being sold on a supply and demand basis.

For start-ups like Tesla, and early investors into electric vehicle production like Elon Musk, cold hard cash is everything essential.

Tesla rummaged known interested venture capital parties for another $100,000 in development money for the first EV roadster prototype. Everything at Tesla ran on a long shoestring budget with many elite players invested in the company by poviding downpayments towards the sight unseen electric vehicles.

Initially, Tesla had such little cash that they were not able to machine the electric vehicle parts themselves for the initial prototype. Instead, Tesla commodified a chassis from a competing manufacturer of high end sports cars, after carefully testing commodification out on various chassis already in use by gas engine competitors.

Tesla needed a chassis that could accommodate the giant battery fuel cell that was itself a commodification of existing laptop battery products.

Tesla repeated the same commodification process in the initial stages of the development of the Tesla Model S. The Tesla Roadster was always meant to be a limited special edition for the financial elite, while the Tesla Model S was to be the first mass produced Tesla electric vehicle.

There is nothing sinister about this approach to development, since many automotive parts are outsourced, but the manner in which the public was sold the idea of a mass market electric vehicle is a form of censorship. Commodification is a bit of a lie that gets continually repeated and retested throughout the eTech world.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange believes that the new world of truth is composed of several layers of censorship with tidy errors and omissions on the public record, while much of the miss telling in private being rather purposeful.

The gravamen begins with self-censorship and eTech companies refusing to publish and writers refusing to write because doing so would result in immediate and direct economic pushback.

The new age eTech roadster was initially an amalgam of bits and pieces of existing gas engine vehicles with the Tesla contribution being an electric power train fueled by hundreds of laptop batteries.

Similarly, the most successful user generated on-line content is that which has been commodified from other sources. In a way, an on-line post may be most appealing as a pastiche of facts and falsehoods that creates unique meta data for search engines and newsfeeds.

Facebook users who commodify content do better in the newsfeeds than the authors of the original content because of the meta data the search engines latch on to, like closing the hatch on a computer generated submarine before submerging into the digital universe.

The United States Congress changed the nature of censorship by redefining publishing for the on-line world. Those big eTech companies are absolved of any liability in third party publishing through the double speak contained in the United States Communication Decency Act of 1996 (CDA).

Like every other law, every wrinkle in the new publishing definition has been exploited, so that decency now means protecting publishers of indecency from liability. According to this new interpretation, information platforms like Facebook, which are clearly publishers like the old-school book makers in digital form, is actually not a publisher, but a provider for third party publishers.

The courts believe that even if the billion dollar eTech firm is aware of a hate crime, the CEO’s and employees, waiting to cash out large company share portfolios, cannot be held accountable, even if the hate speech has been brought to their attention.

This omnibus government protection allows large global corporation to cross over into digital publishing with immunity, even when purposefully remanufacturing a lie into the truth to change political elections.

The virtues of free speech in promoting tolerance, equality and justice are lost in a lie, in published hate speech, and when aiding and abetting crime that diminishes human dignity.

Meta Platforms Inc CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, Instagram, What’s App) has total immunity across social media sites because of all the chaos in publishing the legislation has created.

Netflix is also a publishing platform just as Facebook is except that the rate of publishing on Netflix is at a slower more controlled pace. Netflix picks and chooses titles to stream, and pays a licensing fee to the production companies.

CONTROL

FACEBOOK HAS LESS INITIAL CONTROL THAN NETFLIX, BUT THERE EXISTS THAT OFTEN NOT USED ABILITY TO SWIFTLY REMOVE POSTS AND DELETE PAGES ON DISCOVERING CONTENT OFFENSIVE TO FREE SPEECH

Facebook has less initial control, but Zuckerberg can swiftly remove posts and delete pages on discovering content he finds unworthy of the free speech and free press protections so embedded in the United States Constitution.

Google and Amazon are competing publishing companies. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos stopped paying Google the billion dollar annual advertising fee for Amazon products to show up in search engine results, because he was paying to be censored.

Google put Amazon in a paying competition with other online retailers with paid Amazon ads appearing beside other paid ads in Google search for the same products. And if you don’t pay, you don’t show up in search results, or at the least, you get slotted in a spot not worth any meaning.

As Amazon developed a product line and extended the global reach for selling those products, the company began to compete directly with Google for search engine results. People could go directly to Amazon to use their product search engine, or they could use Google search to find the same products sold at Amazon and a number of different online retailers.

Google is so manipulative and controlling when it comes to forcing payment for advertising, but when the anti-sex trade lobby asks the big giant eTech company to remove sites promoting the pornification of young women and children, someone just has to mention section 230 of the CDA.

Amazon took the billion dollars away from Google and used the cash to develop their own site’s search engine.

The eCommerce revolution has created a lot of chaos out of which the big eTech firms have created international monopolies with annual revenue of $70+ billion.

This state of lawlessness censors out ethics and people over the profit motive, leaving undefined revolution and fanaticism to spur growth in capitalist democracies.

The European Union passed the Digital Markets Act, which will allow the marketplace to whittle away at the monopolies. Google and Apple are now required to allow other eTechnology developers to access their platforms.

These American monopolies are information gatekeepers. The public version is free and democratic in the name of free speech, but the inside private operations of digital information are controlling, manipulative and driven by the profit motive – not much different than print publishing.

The judiciary are being lied to by Big eTech in that they have been told that old school publishing controls are impractical with the millions of bits of information published onto platforms each day by millions of users.

But Zuckerberg and Google founders Larry Page

and Sergey Brin

maintain control within the user initiated chaos as long as the price point is beneficial to them.

Companies like Amazon and Apple have stayed away from social media publishing, but remain publishers as distributers of third party content, such as streaming music and movies. Commerce is the driving force of eTechnology companies, not freedom, free speech or democracy.

Assange founded Wikileaks in the name of freedom, free speech and good government. But Assange quickly discovered that web pages referencing Wikileaks were being censored by Google, while unbeknownst to the public, Google CEOs had close ties to United States President Barack Obama’s Administration.

Wikileaks had held the United States accountable nevertheless, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Post 9/11 Middle East Wars.

Online life is a bit like living in a casino with a lot of chaos all around, and only fleeting random luck at the tables. The net result is individual censorship and an ever diminishing freedom and democracy – particularly because of the double speak at the slots, I mean search engines.

Google has the ability to prioritize web search results to promote their own business interests. These monopolies are not victims of overwhelming user interfaces that should be protected from liability by s 230 of the CDA, so much as they are publishers cherry picking and subjectively choosing how their business operates to maximize billion dollar annual profits.

The big lie by Big eTech and the US Congress is that search engines are public commons when in reality nothing is free, although everything is public.

The Google lie about platform neutrality causes a gaslighting of users trapped inside the chaos of algorithmic unfairness. Google continues to publish, without rules or without respect for the rules, by hiding behind the idea of them being information gatekeepers, while culling human sentimentality.

Former US National Security Agency operative Edward Snowden states that technological innovation outpaces all moral and ethical boundaries. The intent is to foster the development of the eCommerce marketplace and the digital universe, but the effect has been an “uncontrolled monster” more commonly known in the secret intelligence field as the ‘Frankenstein Effect.’

TROPES

A DIRECT MAPPING OF OLD SOCIAL BARRIERS AND STIGMA INTO THE NEW DIGITAL MEDIA ARCHITECTURE

UCLA Professor Safiya Umoja Noble found that there had been a direct mapping of old social barriers and stigma into the new digital media architecture.

Computer code, controlling, manipulating and categorizing information, is a language full of meaning. These algorithms are written by Silicon Valley techs more often than not educated in the American university system where they learn to share the same biased world view as the dominant elite controlling the classrooms and writing the textbooks.

Noble found that marginalized people are exponentially harmed by Google. And that far from spreading the words of freedom and equality, Google promulgates racial and gender barriers already firmly entrenched in the social system.

In this same way, the big digital electronic machines, controlling the on-line universe with artificial intelligence, still have a consciousness as a creation of human discretion originally formed within the collective.

A publicly benevolent eTech company may in realty be so imbued in self-interest, driven by the profit motive in particular, and perhaps also by delusions of social engineering a better democratic society without actually having been elected to political office, that the corporation is, in effect, privately malevolent, and at the very least, not as advertised.

Big Tech companies like Amazon, Disney, Apple and Netflix limit their publishing interests to distribution, whereas social media platforms massage third party content in a manner that undefines publishing.

Assange describes censorship as the intention to mask the truth in layers of misdirection and unintelligible meaning. This lawlessness in the presentation of the digital word creates a lot of chaos.

This particular brand of chaos benefits the status quo and the Washington establishment by creating a buffer from substantive systemic change, thereby sacrificing the truth of the present in a kind of careless disregard for right and wrong.

Justice has been nonchalantly set aside.

If people think they can print anything, certain people actually will print anything. This barrage of lies and insults censors public knowledge by burying the truth and the earnest pursuit of tolerance, equality and justice.

Racial and gender subjugation continues to be profitable to the white, male dominant corporate class structure, according to Noble.

Big eTech corporations are billion dollar information monopolies that reach far and wide beyond any political borders.

Noble states that egregious and racist content becomes highly profitable because that content attracts the interest of the dominant classes within the majority rule.

Instead of search engines becoming the great equalizers of our times, the information gatekeepers are hegemonic devices.

Even if the artificial intelligence running the big online machines have not purposefully been programmed to be racist or sexist or to sell images of young black girls for pornification, those are the search engine results, according to Noble.

That method of overlooking outcomes permeates the new economy, fueled by cash flow and venture capital, with a lot of speculation permeating everything inside and outside the economy.

Tesla and SpaceX just began producing products before they had been properly developed. Musk even stated that he didn’t mind so much if he had to watch his spacecrafts blow up on the launch pad a few times, after the spacecraft in development blew up three times in a row, before getting it right. Musk then sold a home based flame thrower as an accessory to his celebrity status.

‘It’s okay though because everything has worked out.’

In the early years, after commodifying a chassis and automotive parts, Tesla had to sell their unique electronic power trains and solar energy systems in a horizontal market to other competing manufacturers so as to generate sufficient cash flow for the next phase of unregulated economic growth.

To avert becoming relegated to a continued existence as a parts supplier, Tesla sold a 10% stake in the company to Daimler Chrysler for $50 million. The Obama Administration also provided financial grants to Tesla.

The importance of keeping pace with change and being the first to market was so breathtaking that Musk spent considerable time deficit financing the production of electric vehicle to keep the company moving forward.

The economic pressures are similar in other industries as well, because of a general business model tethered to Wall Street financial interests.

Netflix started out as a mail order movie DVD rental company in direct competition with Blockbuster retail stores in 1997. In essence, Netflix cofounders Reed Hastings

and Marc Randolph

moved to do for the movie business, in an $8 billion movie rental industry, what Amazon and Jeff Bezos had done for book selling and general retail.

Netflix relied on the First Sale/Second Use Doctrine developed out of the 1908 United States Copyright Law and a 1981 US Supreme Court ruling that granted the right to resell or rent the movie DVDS that they owned.

But even with $100,000 in rentals the first month, Netflix had to stall the eventual bankruptcy of the company until technology changed VHS to DVD and more people bought more DVD players as the price of the machines dropped.

The dilemma seems trite now with digital movies and streaming platforms finding common ground in the public marketplace, but Hastings could not really compete with Blockbuster because of the cost of shipping bulky VHS tapes and the high price of VHS home machines that limited the pool of potential customers.

Technology changed everything with a cheaper DVD machine below $200 finding a way into almost every household, and with the thinner profile of DVD’s that could be shipped in the regular mail all within the framework of a price point that beat Blockbuster retail stores.

Netflix survived the corporate battle for movie rentals by generated sufficient cash flow to adapt the business model with the changing technology, while Blockbuster was too slow to transition from retail stores, and then chose the low end of eTechnology that could not process the eventual on-line demand.

Netflix in the meantime positioned itself as the ‘it’ movie rental company while the platforms changed yet again, this time from renting physical copies to selling subscriptions for streaming digital movies on-line.

Like a quickening, by the time Netflix moved from renting DVDs through the United States Postal Service to streaming movies online, Blockbuster had fallen too far behind with the wrong choice of technology and too much debt to be refinanced.

The players have to be fast to survive.

When the film distribution industry changed irrevocably to on-line streaming, Disney lost hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees that the production company would normally earn from broadcast stations for Disney programming. CEO Bob Iger realized soon enough that he had to transition the entertainment company to a new era of distribution.

Amazon too had to quickly grow into other global markets before upstarts got their market share first with their stolen idea. Bezos business sense was to create the eCommerce platform by selling books, but then to add more products as quickly as the market and the online technology would allow.

The economic ethics are so precarious that when Amazon failed to establish an on-line presence in India in 2004, Amazon’s former employees, Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, started their own brand of online retailing specific to the market in India, called Flipkart, just three years later. To keep going, Flipkart sold a stake in the company to Walmart, a direct competitor of Amazon, for $16 billion in 2018.

Similarly, Alibaba beat out Amazon in China by undercutting the commission on sales to 2-3 per cent, substantially down from the 10-15 per cent Amazon charged. Alibaba also had an inside track with the Chinese authorities, while Bezos struggled with that outsider label.

The anti-direct foreign investment rules brought into play in India in 2013 underlined the need for Big eTech to know that the inside passages of foreign markets were controlled by government and the inner circles.

The monopoly held by Flipkart and Amazon amounted to 80 per cent of the on-line retail market, eventually leading to new anti-trust rules and foreign ownership laws in India.

Amazon had still lost $1 billion a year in India. So, Bezos purchasing the Washington Post Newspaper for $250 million was like giving to charity. Bezos turned the newspaper company around from a $10 million loser in 2015, to a $100 million profit winner over the next three years by going on-line.

By the time Amazon returned from the Far East and looked south for growth, Walmart and Mercado Libre had already established a presence in Mexico for the $7.1 billion eCommerce marketplace.

Mistakes are made along the way, the pace of change is so quick.

Netflix initially offered free movie rentals as part of a marketing campaign, but the coupons were printed without a unique numbering system so Netflix could not keep track of who had how many, and customers could simply use another coupon instead of paying for the next rental, as the company had hoped the promotion to unfold.

Tesla initially bought the batteries from Asia and flew in the roadster chassis from the UK, then assembled and installed the battery pack in California. The robotic assembly line initially produced flawed prototypes that were sold to waiting customers with waning patience.

And instead of placing the deposits in escrow, Tesla used the funds for cash flow while Musk personally guaranteed the deposits from his personal fortune acquired from the sale of PayPal.

Musk depended on the elite customers being loyal and not demanding their deposits back as Tesla struggled with missed production deadlines. Tesla also increased the cost of the roadsters already on order to make up for cash short falls in development. The price was increased for a car that still did not exist.

Musk was literally scrambling for cash in his bid to beat the Big 6 automakers as the first company to mass manufacture electric vehicles. Even when production began, the lack of loyalty on the production line caused a number of manufacturing defects that would slow Tesla growth.

Amazon marched on through the storm with the trouble light motto of innovating themselves out of the chaos.

All the more concerning, eTech companies not only run roughshod through production missteps, but the companies change the engineering of communities like Redmond, Washington, and the Mission District in San Francisco, California by bringing into the community employees with higher than average income levels. These new arrivals then spend more and live a higher lifestyle, thereby driving up the cost of living for people already living in the community for other reasons.

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff asserts that a corporation is just a set of rules and just a code in the digital universe, while the corporation has no mind for people priorities and the future of civilization.

Technology had gradually replaced the human element in the means of production, over many centuries. And eTech is just finishing the job by disassociating people from production. Consumer loyalty has instead shifted to the brand and the billionaire entrepreneurs behind the eCommerce celebrity culture, instead of with the people manufacturing the products.

What do electric vehicles, streaming movies, on-line retailers, social media platforms, and information gatekeepers have in common?

Digital passages through the virtual universe are controlled with planned chaos.

So where do you want to go and how do you expect to get there?

Forward, in that direction, everyone seems to want to be heading through the maddening crowd of the unconnected trying to get connected.

But moving forward with such speed and acceleration has become reckless and unmanageable.

What existed before the digital commerce giant wave still exists, but 10 and 20-fold more luxurious and more depraved, with just a tiny percentage of users finding celebrity existence in mansions and on yachts, while more homeless find failure and loneliness on the streets.

Algorithms of Oppression, How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, by Safiya Umoja Noble, New York, New York University Press, 2018

Cypherpunks, Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn and Jeremy Zimmerman, New York, O/R Books, 2012.

Google Leaks: A Whistleblower’s Expose of Big Tech Censorship, by Zach Vorhies and Kent Heckenlively, JD, New York, Skyhorse Publishing, 2021

NETFLIX: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs, by Gina Keating, New York, Penguin, 2012.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone, New York, Little Brown and Company, 2013.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became The Enemy of Prosperity, by Douglas Rushkoff, New York, Portfolio/Penguin, 2016

Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, by Marshall McLuhan, London, The MIT Press, 1996

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