LA OLIGARQUÍA, LAS BIG TECH Y LA CATEDRAL
Las Big Tech no tienen ningún poder en absoluto
Lo básico que hay que saber sobre la censura que ejercen las BIG TECH y la estructura de la catedral.
Autor: Curtis Yarvin
Nota original: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/big-tech-has-no-power-at-all
Traducción @Hyspasia
Nota de la Traductora: Elegí este texto porque tiene una descripción funcional de lo que es una oligarquía plutocrática - en criollo: el gobierno de los ricachones -. Y desarrolla cómo funciona, cómo toma sus decisiones y cómo influye en el resto de la sociedad. Al mismo tiempo, a mi entender, es demasiado permisivo con la conducta de las caras visibles de las Big Tech. Puede ser cierto que ellos no mandan, de hecho concuerdo, pero tampoco son pobres margaritas del prado; nadie los obliga a ser testaferros del Poder. Tampoco creo que el mecanismo sobre las Big Tech sea el descripto de coacción. Siempre pensé que el Deep State es el verdadero dueño de esas empresas y se limita a dar órdenes, como por ejemplo, expulsar a Donald Trump. El Deep State es el dueño, ordena a los payasos que nos venden como los dueños de las Big Tech y los millonarios de Sillicon Valley y ellos no tienen más acción que cumplir. Dividí en dos partes. La primera (ésta) sobre las Big Techs. La segunda sobre la oligarquía, que creo la más jugosa.
Somos muy malos en observar el poder. O dicho en otras palabras: el poder es muy bueno en no ser visto.
Como el poder es universal en la humanidad, todo pensamiento está en el área de algún poder.
La idea de pensarse a sí mismo es inherentemente extraño al poder. El poder no quiere conocerse a sí mismo. Los poderes más poderosos ni siquiera se ven a sí mismos como poder. Si el poder se conoce a sí mismo, guarda ese conocimiento para sí; más aún: no cree sus propios mitos.
La idea de estudiar a sus enemigos, en cambio, es muy grato y natural. El poder tiene que conocer a sus enemigos - otro poder en competencia - para poder pelearle; también, para demonizarlo. Toda estructura de poder del enemigo es revestida de brillo maligno, como si nuestro sistema inmunológico nos advirtiera de organismos extraños.
Es por eso que la gente cree que Mark Zuckerberg o Jeff Bezos tienen poder - poder político para ser exactos. (Obviamente ellos tienen poder profesional). Se ven como algo que su sistema inmunológico debería tener en cuenta. En realidad, no son improtantes, son bacterias inofensivas. Es cierto que usted tiene una enfermedad letal. Es una que su cuerpo reconoce como sí mismo.
Para iluminar al lecto, la ruptura del 2021 prueba justo lo opuesto: Los oligarcas tecnológicos no tienen poder en absoluto.
Nuestra forma de gobierno
Hay tres formas de gobierno: monarquía, oligarquía y democracia. Nuestra forma de gobierno es oligárquica [EEUU] con algunos vestigios de elementos monárquicos y democráticos. Se debería enseñar a los niños en tercer grado, pero por obvias razones no se hace.
(Un vestigio de órgano es algo que se puede remover sin que cambie seriamente al funcionamiento del organismo. Cualquiera que sabe algo de Washington puede decirle que cualquier cosa funcionaría mejor sin la Casa Blanca. Esto es cierto sin dudas en política doméstica - la única política que importa (*). Como la elección presidencial es la última elección que a una persona le puede interesar en este país abandonado por la mano de Dios [EEUU], si el presidente ya no importa más, menos va a importar la elección. Por lo que todo esto es una tormenta en una taza de té).
Hay diferentes formas de oligarquía con diferentes tipos de jugadores. Nuestra [EEUU] oligarquía es una oligarquía institucional policéntrica propulsada por prestigo. Varias instituciones tienen distintos niveles de prestigio informal; confieren credenciales a los distintos jugadores, que luego proclaman dicho prestigio. La mayoría de esas instituciones son “sin fines de lucro”.
Nuestra oligarquía hace decisiones legítimas a través de procesos formales de instituciones prestigiosas. Usualmente no vemos eso como poder, aunque claro que lo es. Trazar las razones por las que un jurado académico o un directorio de una fundación hace una recomendación haría parecer a la corte del Rey Enrique VII de Inglaterra franca, directa y expedita.
La oligarquía no elimina el poder pero es maestra en camuflarlo. La monarquía puede perecer bajo la espada - pero sólo un fuego que consuma absolutamente todo puede librarnos de una oligarquía. Como dijo Carlyle del Foreign Office [GB], “la única forma de reformarlo es ponerle brasas por debajo que lo consuman por completo”.
El Poder a través de la lente de la oligarquía
Cuando pensamos en el poder en una oligarquía, no pensamos en los bloques de poder oligárquicos; para nosotros, proceso y prestigio.
Nosotros pensamos en los bloques de poder democráticos y monárquicos. Y los odiamos con pasión. Siempre asociamos el poder con la maldad y con las formas de gobierno que detestamos; por lo tanto esas formas de gobierno extrañas nos parecen la maldad más profunda. No se nos ocurre que esa pasión, que nosotros tomamos como justicia, es en realidad una profunda expresión de lealtad; en términos de Gaetano Mosca; una fórmula política.
Nuestro odio más virulento es contra el poder democrático. No existe nada más despreciable que la acción colectiva espontánea motivada por un interés colectivo con consenso homogéneo. En una escala nacional, esa acción es populismo; en una escala menor es un linchamiento o un pogrom.
Un linchamiento es un ejemplo perfecto de nuestro odio a un poder democrático. Un linchamiento es una pena capital infligida por un crimen real o supuesto. Pero el castigo es ilegítimo, porque es infligido por un consenso colectivo. Para que la pena capital sea legítima, debe ser infligida por un proceso oligárquico: un juicio. Un proceso oligárquico debe decidir si la pena capital es legítima o no en ese caso.
Nuestro segundo odio virulento es contra el poder monárquico. Parte de una emoción humana encantadora denominada envidia. Siempre estamos a la búsqueda de tiranos, reyes, magnates y otros villanos. Es difícil imaginar una película en la cual el antagonista no sea una persona, sino un sistema. Aún The Matrix tiene que recurrir a la ciencia ficción para lograrlo.
Puede ser que usted no piense que Mark Zuckerberg sea un villano. Pero es algo muy cercano a un rey. Es rico como el demonio y la palabra “poderoso” queda en la punta de la lengua.
En resumen: completa su prejuicio de lo que el poder es. Como el poder es oligárquico, siempre miramos a las amenazas como monárquicas o democráticas. (La peor pesadilla es una monarquía colaborando con una democracia contra una oligarquía (**) - como si un rey instigara a una turba a quemar el templo. Hm).
Por lo tanto, cuando usted postea mierda en su cuenta de Facebook por alguna razón y Zuck y sus alcahuetes lo suspenden a usted, usted naturalmente piensa que usted fue suspendido por el poder del Rey Zuck.
Por lo que parece obvio y claro decir que Mark Zuckerberg tiene poder. No podrían estar más equivocados, sin embargo.
Mark Zuckerberg no tiene poder en absoluto
Usted no diría que sus alcahuetes tienen poder. No que ellos se identifiquen a sí mismos como tales. Pero nadie acusa a los moderadores de Facebook por su suspensión. El poder para suspenderle no es su poder; operan bajo el dominio de Zuck, el absoluto monarca de Facebook.
¿Cuál es la causa de la acción de Zuck? Debe ser él, ¿no? Él es el jefe, ¿no? Bueno...no hay poder sobre él. Nadie le da órdenes a Zuck.
Esto es - no hay un poder monárquico sobre él. No hay un Palpatine para su Darth Vader. Pero hay otras dos formas de poder.
¿Hay un poder democrático sobre él? Podríamos imaginar una elección en Facebook que elija un tribuno en nombre del pueblo - o al menos un tribuno de los perfiles de Facebook -, poder que pueda pasar por encima del Gerente General en tema de gobernancia de la red social. Esto no existe y nadie lo está pidiendo - probablemente porque sería insano. Pero sería divertido.
¿Hay un poder oligárquico sobre él? Bueno, no podemos estar seguros. Como hemos observado con antelación, mientras es fácil distinguir un poder monárquico o democrático, que odiamos peor que los goblins de Tolkien a las espadas Biter y Beater, normalmente no procesamos el poder oligárquico como poder per se.
Gracias a su camuflaje, no podemos verlo. Debemos develarlo, destaparlo, cuidadosamente, como si fuéramos arqueólogos.
De todas formas, si Zuck es sometido a algún tipo de poder oligárquico, se encuentra en exactamente la misma posición que sus moderadores. Él ejercita poder, pero él no es el poder, porque no ejerce su voluntad. El poder no fluye de él, sino a través de él. Por eso es que él puede decir con seriedad y honestidad que no tiene poder. No es de él sino de alguna otra persona.
La esencia del poder oligárquico
La mejor manera de describir el poder oligárquico sobre Mark Zuckerberg, como sobre cualquier gerente general de las grandes compañías, es que deben rendir cuentas. En principio, deber rendir cuentas es bueno y necesario. La estructura de gerenciamiento óptimo es una monarquía que rinde cuentas, que es precisamente la razón por la cual la mayoría de las organizaciones exitosas, pequeñas o grandes, la usan.
Hay dos tipos de poder oligárquico: poder formal, que es decidido por un proceso, y poder informal, que es decidido por prestigio.
Los dos procesos formales por los cuales un gerente general de una compañía deben rendir cuentas es frente a un directorio o frente a los tribunales.
Las acciones mágicas de Zuck hacen que él tenga control de su propio directorio - no demasiada rendición de cuentas ahí - pero él no puede arrojar al cesto de la basura un oficio o una citación judicial más que un croto que vive bajo un puente. En realidad el croto tiene mejores chances que él de desobedecer una orden judicial.
Y por el poder informal del prestigio - bueno, por supuesto, la respuesta es obvia, ¿no?
El Gerente General y la prensa
Zuck no quiere nada de todo esto. Tampoco sus usuarios. Más bien, lo hace porque está siendo presionado por la prensa. Uh.
Ni siquiera puede admitir que está sometido a coacción - que a sus guardas del Vietcong se les puede soltar la cadena y balearlo como el perro occidental capitalista que es.
¿Qué le da a la prensa ese poder terrorífico? ¿El puro y hermoso poder del logos? ¿Qué distingue un post bien escrito, como éste de una operación mediática del Times? Nada excepto el prestigio.
La diferencia entre el poder oligárquico formal e informal, proceso y prestigio, no es tan grande como podría parecer. Ambos son consecuencias arbitrarias de eventos históricos, a menudo distantes en el pasado. Y ambos extremadamente convincentes.
En tiempos normales, cualquier gerente general sano concedería sin dudar al más mero capricho de una prensa legítima, de la misma forma que cumplirían sin dudar una orden judicial. Así es como funciona. No llamar a este poder gobierno es simplemente jugar con las palabras.
Aprendiendo de Corea del Norte
Parte del problema de Facebook hoy es que la prensa actual aprendió la irritante pero sensata estrategia de negociación de Corea del Norte de “no tomar un sí como respuesta”.
La cultura corporativa de los EEUU brinda importancia al obsequioso y completo apaciguamiento de la prensa, que es normalmente la acción prudente a llevar a cabo. Pero porque las personas tengan MBAs [Maestrías en Negocios], usen pantalones de color caqui y que le hagan acordar del personaje Jared de “Silicon Valley”, no significa que sean estúpidos.
Cuando a un acto de apaciguamiento o aquiescencia es seguido no por paz, amor y armonía sino por una nueva y más descarada demanda, acoplada a agresiones más y más ácidas, hasta que tiene a Kim Jong-Un dispuesto a bombardear Seattle a menos de que acepte un apasionado fin de semana con Melania - comienza a parecer que hay algo mal con la negociación.
Cuanto más censura Facebook, más claro queda que Facebook es un cómplice de asesinato y saca provecho rutinariamente del odio. Las corporaciones están acostumbradas a lidiar con poderes racionales como el estado, frente al cual el cumplimiento hace que decaiga la presión. Las corporaciones no están acostumbradas a lidiar con un poder psicópata [N. de T.: pyscho en el original], frente al cual ceder acrecienta la presión - como Tony Soprana reventando un local de artículos deportivos.
La regulación es difícil, en particular si debe funcionar
Es esencial para cualquiera que intente producir una regulación y/o legislación para arreglar el problema que reconozca que, desde el momento de que el problema no es la voluntad de Facebook, todo poder que obliga a Facebook es irrelevante.
Si usted quiere que Facebook se enfrente a la prensa, debe darle una herramienta para hacerlo. No existe forma - en particular desde el momento en que Facebook tiene un enorme, enérgico contingente interno de Janes Fondas simpatizantes del Vietcong. O necesita algo más fuerte que la prensa, como los tribunales.
Algunos sugirieron “sección 230” y cosas por el estilo. Todo ese no sirve. Conozco gente trabajando en el tema. Lo siento. Es patético. Ahí está, lo dije. El Untergang de el Trumpreich es su chance para tirar la toalla sobre la “sección 230” (siempre la confundo con una sección del código penal nazi sobre la pedofilia, de todas formas).
Consideren la probabilidad de un tribunal norteamericano desafiando la prensa para defender un magnazi. ¿Es posible? Dividamos la cantidad de veces por año que eso pueda suceder, por el número de cuentas de Facebook que se suspenden o eliminar por hora. No tomen en cuenta el desacople de unidades de cuenta… no importa. Ustedes entienden.
Esencialmente, está mal culpar las compañías de redes sociales por las regulaciones de las redes sociales, o peor aún, culpar a sus gerentes generales. Es culpar al molino por el viento. Los perdedores hacen frente a la situación y los ganadores no tienen que hacerlo. Hagamos frente a la verdadera razón de la verdadera causa de la censura en las redes sociales: siempre y en todo lugar, la verdadera causa es el poder de la prensa.
Entendiendo mal el poder de la prensa
Pero si frenamos nuestra búsqueda de casualidad en “la prensa”, estamos todavía en la oscuridad. Debemos perseguir las causales hasta su feo final.
¿Qué está mal con la prensa? ¿Es controlada por los judíos? Aún en esta oscura fantasía, imaginamos un poder no oligárquico - nuestro enemigo es una raza, que es un poder democrático. Si estamos peleando contra los judíos, peleamos contra el demos judío.
Es cierto que muchos judíos poseen diarios y otras cosas. Eso no necesariamente demuestra que los dueños apoyen las opiniones, presumiblemente opiniones superjudías, en sus propios despachos. De hecho, cualquiera que sepa algo de periodismo, sabe que no lo hacen y no pueden hacerlo. Y la propensión de los judíos de poseer cosas es fácilmente explicada por nuestra notoria astucia.
No tomo en cuenta la porquería de Rupert Murdoch, que no es periodista. Es más, Murdoch puede ser escosés, pero todo comunista es un judío honorario - como lo destaca Wikipedia,
Hay un barón del periodismo al que se le permite gerenciar su propio diario. Es el más prestigioso diario del mundo, por supuesto - y ya existía antes de que ninguno de nosotros hubiera nacido. Él está a cargo porque lo heredó de su padre que lo heredó de su padre, que lo heredó de su padre.
El hecho es que aún si el Times y su dinastía de monarquía absoluta se desvanecieran - tal vez desapareciendo en un gigantesco hoyo negro en Midtown - la prensa seguiría siendo la prensa. Y si todas esas compañías de periodismo fueran propiedad de arios de forma tal de que hicieran parecer a Max von Sydow como una especie de Danny de Vito, la prensa seguiría siendo la prensa.
(Queridos antisemitas: aprecio la innegable sinceridad de su antisemitismo - mientras había una gran cantidad de falsos antisemitas en el Tercer Reich, hoy es una posición más sincera - pero están ladrando al árbol incorrecto. Lo siento).
Entendiendo el poder de la prensa
¿Por qué la prensa ataca a Facebook? No lo sé - ¿por qué un tiburón come focas? ¿Tiene hambre? ¿Le gustan las focas? ¿O simplemente le gusta comer a esos animalitos Probablemente las tres cosas.
La prensa ataca a Facebook porque puede. Facebook, como cualquier cosa grande, es usada para varias cosas. Algunas buenas, otras malas. Todos los días, en algún lugar del mundo Facebook es usado para salvar a un hermoso y pequeño perrito. Ocasionalmente, y no muy frecuentemente en absoluto, Facebook es usado para organizar crueles masacres de inocentes. ¿Sobre cuál de estos dos hechos escribirá la prensa?
Seriamente, la prensa ataca a Facebook porque puede atacar a Facebook o no escribir sobre Facebook en absoluto. No hay mercado para periodismo pro-Facebook. El concepto es ridículo. Pero, ¿qué motiva a un periodista a atacar a Facebook?
Primero, la motivación es profundamente oligárquica. Actúa a nivel individual. Nadie da órdenes a un periodista. El siente la oportunidad de atacar; no es un soldado en una guerra, obedeciendo las órdenes de un general; es un depredador en la naturaleza, mordisqueando el flanco de una ballena azul mortalmente herida.
El poder monárquico actúa por compulsión: da órdenes y comanda. El poder oligárquico actúa de dos maneras - por compulsión o por atracción. El periodista es atraído por la oportunidad de compeler (presionar) a Facebook. O mejor aún, presionar a sus usuarios. Más jugoso.
Es más, el camino del poder no termina en el periodista - el periodista también él es un mero conductor. Si bien él personalmente puede desear poder, trabaja para un negocio, y el negocio de ese negocios es vender poder, o al menos el olor del poder a sus lectores. Quienes, cuando leen un artículo, sienten que sus testículos crecen, como si ellos mismos hubieran logrado esa hazaña.
De ahí la larga cadena de poder que comienza con un proctólogo retirado que lee el Times en Great Neck, a Sulzberger XVII en su ornamentada guarida de esplendor bárbaro, a un periodista adjunto que hace U$D 87 mil al año y gasta todo ese dinero en que le cuiden a sus hijos, a Facebook que es más grande que Australia y a Mark Zuckerberg que puede meter a Italia en su MasterCard, a una abuela de 67 años en Saint Louis que sólo quiere hablar pestes de los progres y que es lo suficientemente bruta y falta de educación como para entender que eso la puede convertir en una terrorista doméstica a la cual la Inteligencia Artificial (AI) la ha denunciado automáticamente al FBI.
¿No es hermoso este círculo? ¿Ya hablé de brasas que consuman por completo? Pero esto es tirar la pelota al corner.
Si el lector no tiene poder sobre Facebook, no puede importarle menos cosas sobre las que no tiene poder, y reduce su demanda por artículos sobre Facebook. Esto a su vez hace que sea un tema menos atractivo para un periodista.
Si Facebook no tiene poder para censurar a sus usuarios, no tendrá poder para censurarlos ante el pedido de los periodistas. Deja de ser un objetivo atractivo para los periodistas, porque los periodistas no pueden obligarlo a hacer nada, y no pueden a través de él compeler a los usuarios.
Podemos resumir la relación entre Facebook y la prensa en que Facebook filtra poder. Ofrece un conductor por el cual los periodistas pueden ejercitar poder sobre los usuarios de Facebook - al presionar Facebook o su gerente general.
Desde el momento en que hay muchos usuarios de Facebook, un montón de poder quiere colarse en ese conductor. Pasa a través de Facebook hasta el usuario, sube por su tracto digestivo hasta su boca. Zuckerberg tiene tanto poder para bloquear este flujo como para bloquear un rayo.
(Continúa en la segunda y última parte).
* * *
Notas:
(*) Nota de la Traductora: por el contrario el General Perón sostenía que política es política exterior, la única que importa.
(**) N. de T.: Justamente la alianza entre monarquía y el pueblo contra una oligarquía (la nobleza) fue el proceso en Europa Occidental entre finales de la Edad Media que finalizó en la conformación de la Modernidad. Ese proceso que se dio en España con Carlos V y Felipe II, de la Casa de los Austrias, queda reflejado en dos obras maestras: Fuenteovejuna y El Alcalde de Zalamea.
Big tech has no power at all
The basics of tech censorship and the structure of the cathedral.
We are terrible at seeing power. Or in other words: power is great at not being seen.
Because power is a human universal, all thinking is within the field of some power. Thoughts that go along with the field are obvious and soar up instantly like birds. Thoughts that flow against the field are as slow and impossible as arthritic turtles.
The thought of studying itself is inherently foreign to power. Power does not want to know itself. The most powerful powers do not even think of their power as power. If power does know itself, it keeps that knowledge to itself; but mostly, it really does believe its own official myths. The real O’Brien is a rare figure.
The thought of studying its enemies, however, is very satisfying and natural. Power has to know its enemies—any competing power—to fight them; also, to demonize them. Every power structure which is found in the enemy is suffused with a malign glow, as if our doctrinal immune systems were warning us of alien coronavirus spikes. Ideally, this same structure is not also found in itself; if so, the two must be well-distinguished.
This is why people think Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos have power—political power, to be exact. (They obviously have professional power.) They look like something that your immune system is looking for. Actually, they are unimportant, harmless bacteria. You are right that you have a fatal disease. It is one your body recognizes as self.
To the fully enlightened observer, the crackdown of 2021 proves just the opposite: the tech “oligarchs” have no power at all. Mostly, if they could blink T-O-R-T-U-R-E at you in Morse code, they would. You don’t believe me but I’ll show you why you’re wrong.
Our form of government
There are three forms of government: monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Our form is an oligarchy, with vestigial elements of both monarchy and democracy. Kids should be taught this in third grade but for obvious reasons are not.
(A vestigial organ is one that could be removed without any serious change to the life of the organism. Anyone who knows anything about Washington can tell you that, if anything, it might work better without any White House at all. Certainly this is true in domestic policy, ie, the only policy that matters. Since the Presidential election is the last election that anyone in this godforsaken country still cares about, if the President does not really matter—nor do any elections. The whole show is a tempest in a teacup.)
There are various forms of oligarchy with different kinds of players. Our oligarchy is a polycentric institutional oligarchy powered by informal prestige. Various institutions have various informal prestige levels; they confer formal credentials on the players, who then get to claim that prestige. Mostly these institutions are “nonprofits” of some kind—our version of the great Islamic waqf tradition. The Catholic Church is a vaguely similar structure, but obviously monocentric and highly formalized.
Our oligarchy makes legitimate decisions through formal processes of prestigious institutions. We do not usually think of this as power, though of course it is. Tracing the reason why a given panel made a given recommendation may make understanding the court of Henry VII look straightforward. But some bastard always stacks the panel.
Oligarchy cannot eliminate power, but is masterful in camouflaging it. And if an attack evades the camouflage, oligarchy is inherently redundant. Monarchy can perish by the sword—but only all-consuming fire can clear away an oligarchy. As Carlyle said of the Foreign Office, “the only reform for it is—to set a live coal under it.” Let’s just make sure no one is still in the building when that finally happens.
Power through the lens of oligarchy
When we think about power in an oligarchy, we do not think about the oligarchical building blocks of power: for us, process and prestige.
We think about the democratic and monarchical building blocks of power. And we hate them with a savage passion. We always associate power with evil on one side, and with these alien forms of government on the other; thus, these alien forms are deeply evil. It does not occur to us that this passion, which we feel in ourselves as justice, is actually a deeper expression of loyalty: in Gaetano Mosca’s term, a political formula.
Our most virulent hatred of power is hatred of democratic power. There is nothing we find more despicable than spontaneous collective action motivated by collective self-interest among a homogeneous consensus. On the scale of a country, such action is populism, nationalism, even racism. On a small scale, it is a lynching or a pogrom.
Lynching is a perfect example of our hatred of democratic power. Any lynching is of course a form of capital punishment inflicted for some real or purported crime. But the punishment is illegitimate, because it is inflicted by a collective consensus. If capital punishment is legitimate at all, it must be inflicted by an oligarchical process: a trial. But an oligarchical process must decide whether the death penalty is legitimate at all.
Our second most virulent hatred of power is hatred of monarchical power. This hatred always strongly partakes of the charming human emotion we call envy. We are always looking for tyrants, kings, tycoons, and other mighty villains. It is difficult to imagine a movie in which the antagonist is not a person, but a system—even The Matrix has to go pretty far into weird sci-fi for that.
You may not think of Mark Zuckerberg as a villain. But he is a lot like a king. Certainly he has the professional power of a king over Facebook. He is also rich as hell, and the word “powerful” comes right out of your mouth after “rich and.”
In short: he matches your pattern of what power looks like. Since this pattern is an oligarchical pattern, it is always looking for monarchical and democratic threats. (The worst possible threat is monarchy collaborating with democracy against oligarchy—as if the king whipped up a peasant mob to torch the high temple of the priests. Hm.)
Therefore, when you art a shitlord, and you still hath a Facebook account for some reason, and on that account you do shitpost, and Zuck and his minions do ban you—naturally you feel you art banned by the power of King Zuck.
So it seems obvious and straightforward to say that Mark Zuckerberg has power. It could not be more wrong, though.
Mark Zuckerberg has no power at all
You wouldn’t say that his minions have power. Not that they identify themselves—but no one blames their Facebook ban on the moderators. The power that banned you is not their power; they operate under the dominion of Zuck, the absolute monarch of Facebook. Power is always the ultimate cause of action.
So what is the cause of Zuck’s action? It must be him. He’s the boss, isn’t he? Well… there is no power over him. There is no one who gives the mighty Zuck commands.
That is—there is no monarchical power over him. He has no even more monarchical boss—no Palpatine to his Darth Vader. But there are two other forms of power.
Is there any democratic power over him? We could easily imagine a Facebook election which chose a powerful tribune of the people—or at least, a tribune of the profiles—whose power would override the CEO’s on social-governance issues. This does not exist and no one is asking for it—probably because it would be insane. But maybe fun.
Is there any oligarchic power over him? Well—we can’t be sure. As we observed earlier, while we find it easy to see monarchical and democratic power, which we hate worse than Tolkien’s goblins hated the swords Biter and Beater, we normally do not process oligarchical power as power per se.
Because of this camouflage, we cannot just look at it. We must discover it, carefully as an archeologist.
However, if Zuck is subject to some kind of oligarchic power, he is in exactly the same position as his own moderators. He exercises power, but it is not his power, because it is not his will. The power does not flow from him; it flows through him. This is why we can say honestly and seriously that he has no power. It is not his, but someone else’s.
Why doth Zuck ban shitlords? Is the creator of “Facemash” passionately committed to social justice? Well, maybe. He may have no power, but he is still a bigshot. Bigshots often do get religion in later life—especially when everyone around them is getting it. But—does he have a choice? If he has no choice—he has no power.
The essence of oligarchical power
The best way to describe the oligarchical power over Mark Zuckerberg, or any CEO of a major company, is that the CEO is accountable. In principle, accountability is a good and necessary thing. The optimal management structure is the accountable monarchy, which is precisely why most successful organizations, large or small, use it.
There are two kinds of oligarchical power: formal power, which is decided by process, and informal power, which is decided by prestige. The two formal processes to which the CEO of a company is accountable are the board of directors and the courts.
Zuck’s magic shares give him control over his own board—not much accountability there—but he can no more flout a court order than some homeless guy under a bridge. Actually the homeless guy stands a better chance.
As for the informal power of prestige—well, of course, the answer is obvious, isn’t it? How did it take this many words to understand what’s going on?
The CEO and the press
Zuck doesn’t want to do any of this. Nor do his users particularly want it. Rather, he is doing it because he is under pressure from the press. Duh.
He cannot even admit that he is under duress—or his Vietcong guards might just snap, and shoot him like the Western running-dog capitalist he is.
And what grants the press this terrifying power? The pure and beautiful power of the logos? What distinguishes a well-written poast, like this one, from an equally well-written Times op-ed? Nothing at all but prestige.
The difference between formal and informal oligarchical power, process and prestige, is not as great as it may appear. Both are arbitrary consequences of historical events, often quite distant in the past. Both can be extremely compelling.
In normal times, every sane CEO will comply unhesitatingly with the slightest whim of the legitimate press, just as they will comply unhesitatingly with a court order. That’s just how it is. To not call this power government is—just playing with words.
Learning from North Korea
Part of Facebook’s problem today is that today’s press has learned the irritating but sensible North Korean negotiating strategy of “not taking yes for an answer.”
American corporate culture today always stresses the importance of complete and obsequious appeasement of the press, which is normally prudent indeed. But just because these people have MBAs, wear khaki pants, and often really do remind you of Jared from Silicon Valley, doesn’t make them stupid.
When every act of appeasement is followed not by peace, love and harmony, but by a new and more brazen demand, coupled with more and more vitriolic aggression, until you have Kim Jong-Un ready to nuke Seattle unless we throw in a passionate weekend with Melania—it starts to feel like something is wrong with the negotiation.
The more Facebook censors, the clearer it becomes that Facebook is an accessory to murder and profits routinely from hate. Corporations are used to dealing with rational powers like the state, for which compliance decreases pressure. They are not at all used to dealing with the psycho type of power, for which compliance increases pressure—like Tony Soprano busting out a sporting-goods store.
Regulation is hard, especially if it has to work
It is also essential for anyone trying to produce a regulatory and/or legislative fix to the problem to recognize that, since the problem is not Facebook’s own will, any power that works by compelling Facebook’s will is powerless.
If you want Facebook to be able to stand up to the press, you need to give it a way to stand up to the press. There is no such way—especially since Facebook has such a large, energetic internal contingent of Jane Fonda Vietcong symps. Or you need some other power which can compel it more strongly than the press—such as the courts.
Some have suggested this—”section 230” and the like. This is all 100% snake oil. I know a lot of people working on this stuff. I’m sorry. It’s lame. There, I said it. The Untergang of the Trumpenreich is your chance to throw in the towel on “section 230.” (I always confuse this with the section of the Nazi penal code on pedophilia, anyway.)
Pause, for a moment, to consider the probability of the American courts defying the press in order to defend some Maganazi. It’s… possible? Now, divide the number of times per year this could possibly happen, by the number of Facebook accounts banned per hour. Don’t worry about the unit mismatch—it doesn’t really matter.
Essentially, it is wrong to blame social-media regulations on social-media companies, or even worse their CEOs. You are blaming the windmill for the wind. This is a cope. Losers cope and winners don’t. You are engaged in this cope to avoid blaming the real cause of social-media censorship: always and everywhere, the power of the press.
Misunderstanding the power of the press
But if we just stop our search for causality at “the press,” we are still in the dark. It seems this bitch of a question matters—we have to chase it down to the ugly end, and get our gums around its plums.
What, then, is wrong with the press? Is it controlled by—by the Jews? Even in this dark fantasy, we imagine a nonoligarchic power—our enemy is a race, which is a democratic power. If we are battling the Jews, we are battling the Jewish demos.
Indeed a lot of Jews own newspapers and stuff. This does not necessarily prove that they enforce their opinions, presumably super Jewy opinions, on their own news desks. In fact, anyone who knows anything about journalism knows they don’t and can’t. And the propensity of Jews to own things is easily explained by our notorious cleverness.
I’m not counting Rupert Murdoch garbage, which is not journalism. Also, Murdoch may be a Scotsman, but every communist is an honorary Jew—and, Wikipedia notes, at Oxford “he kept a bust of Lenin in his rooms and became known as ‘Red Rupert.’” There is a lot of bad information on Wikipedia—you can always rely on “Early Life.”
There is just one newspaper baron still allowed to manage his own newspaper. It’s the most prestigious newspaper in the world, of course—and already was before any of us was born. He’s in charge of it because he inherited it from his father, who inherited it from his father, who inherited it from his father.
If our only political plotline is larping the American Revolution, and we need to find a George III to blame social-media censorship on—here is a more logical candidate: not King Zuckerberg, but King Sulzberger. All those bergs! Don’t it jog the ol’ noggin?
But this is also lame. We have been learning to correct this bias of seeing democratic and monarchical power, but not oligarchic power.
The fact is that even if the Times and its hereditary absolute dynasty just vanished—perhaps disappearing down some kind of ginormous Midtown suckhole—the press would be the press. And if all these media companies were owned by Aryans so Aryan they made Max von Sydow look like Danny deVito—the press would be the press.
(Dear anti-Semites: I do appreciate the undeniable sincerity of your anti-Semitism—while there were a lot of fake anti-Semites in the Third Reich, today there is no view more self-evidently sincere—but you are simply barking up the wrong tree. Sorry.)
Understanding the power of the press
Why does the press attack Facebook? I don’t know—why does a shark eat seals? Is it hungry? Does it like the taste of seal? Or does it just like killing the little fuckers? Probably a bit of all three.
The press attacks Facebook because it can. Facebook, like anything big, is used for many things. Some are good, and some are bad. Every day, somewhere in the world, Facebook is used to save an adorable little puppy. Occasionally, really not often at all, Facebook is used to organize a ruthless massacre of the innocent. Which is the press more likely to write about? Huh?
In all seriousness, the press attacks Facebook because it can either attack Facebook, or not write about Facebook at all. There is no market at all for pro-Facebook journalism. The concept is ridiculous. But what motivates journalists to attack Facebook?
First, their motivation is deeply oligarchic. It acts at an individual level. The journalist is not ordered by anyone. He feels an opportunity to attack; he is not a soldier in a war, obeying the commands of a general; he is a predator in the wild, open ocean, tearing huge, delicious blubberhunks from the vast flank of a mortally-wounded blue whale.
Monarchical power works by compulsion: commands and orders. Oligarchic power works in two ways—by compulsion, or by attraction. The journalist is attracted to the opportunity to compel Facebook. Or rather, to compel its users—much juicier.
Moreover, the path of power does not stop at the journalist—the journalist, too, is a mere conduit. While he may personally desire power, he works for a business, and the business of that business is selling power, or at least its smell—to the readers. Who, when they read some hitpiece, feel their balls swell, as if they had pulled that hit.
Hence the long chain of power that runs from a retired proctologist reading the Times in Great Neck, to Sulzberger XVII in his ornate den of barbaric splendor, to some hack adjunct journalist who makes $87K a year and spends it all on childcare and $12 beers, to Facebook which is bigger than Australia and Mark Zuckerberg who could put Italy on his MasterCard, to a 67-year-old grandma in St. Louis who just wanted to talk trash about the libs and is too stupid and uneducated to understand how that can make her a dangerous domestic terrorist whom AI has already automatically reported to the FBI.
Isn’t this whole loop lovely? Didn’t I mention all-consuming fire? But that’s a copout. Let’s look at a couple of ways in which this could be fixed—by cutting the circuit.
If the reader had no power over Facebook, he would care less about things he has no power over, and reduce his demand for hitpieces on Facebook. This would make these pieces less attractive to the journalist.
If Facebook had no power to censor its users, it would not be able to censor them at the request of journalists. It would not be an attractive target for journalists, because journalists could not compel it to do anything, and through it compel its users.
Ultimately we can sum up the relationship between Facebook and the press by saying that Facebook leaks power. It offers a conduit by which journalists can exercise power over Facebook users—by pressuring Facebook or its CEO.
Since there are a lot of Facebook users, a lot of power wants to rush into that conduit. It goes through Facebook, down to the user, up his digestive tract and out his mouth. Zuckerberg could no more block this power flux than he can block a lightning bolt.
Power and ideology
Belief is always and everywhere a consequence of power. If militant Buddhists conquer America, kill our leaders and convert our children to Buddhism, our grandchildren will grow up as Buddhists. That’s just how it is. Some will try to think for themselves—not very many, and not very well.
The strange idea that there can be “no compulsion in religion” makes no sense and is essentially an anti-religious idea. The root lig is the same as in ligature. If religion is a personal philosophy, not a mandatory tie, there is no such thing as religion. This can certainly be tried, and has been.
But belief is not only a consequence of compulsory power. Belief can also be produced by attractive power. People always want to believe things that make them feel powerful.
So the victim creates the bully. The fact that Facebook can be bullied makes people—both journalists and their readers—want to bully Facebook. Facebook’s power leak produces a kind of oasis of power—water in the desert. The water causes the palm trees; the palm trees don’t cause the water.
Facebook was not designed to be a device for managing the minds of billions of people. But as that ape-man in 2001 taught us—if anything is a weapon, some ass-bandit will eventually figure out how to use it as a weapon.
Is there a coordinated attack on Facebook? Yes: the leakage pond is surrounded by a perfect circle of palm trees—anything but a random pattern. No: the trees need no tree-general to order them where to grow.
Facebook is indeed surrounded by enemies, but they are enemies of its own creation. Its business model creates a gigantic stash of power with no real way to defend it. It was keeping big bags of In-n-Out Burgers—animal style—in its tent in bear country. Now the bears are in the tent.
And the same is true of tech as a whole, if we define “tech” as the business model of “pack N users onto 1 giant logical server.” In retrospect, it would seem obvious that some kind of forest beast would want to share any such platform-burger. But, as in any survival experience, mistakes were made and here we are.
Big tech is not being attacked because it is powerful. It is being attacked because it is defenseless—and has a whole lot of potential power that it can’t use to defend itself. Every burger in the bag will be devoured by the strongest, hungriest bear. And once the bag is empty—you’re still in the tent with the bears.
Explaining the bear party
What we see here is a case of spontaneous coordination. The palms were not ordered to grow around the leakage pond; the bears were not invited to a bear party. When we try to understand what happened, we must start from two axioms: that there is order here, and that there is no center to the order.
The fact that Facebook could be bullied made journalists want to bully Facebook. It literally evolved their perspectives toward hating on Facebook, because Facebook’s enormous power leak emitted a pheromone that made all the haters in the world hard. Journalists, like political pornographers, had no choice but to service these super-needy readers: if one journalist didn’t, the next five would.
What we see here is a form of ideological coordination that, oligarchically, gets the same result as monarchical coordination, without any coordinating center. No one ordered all these journalists to start thinking Facebook is bad. Maybe Facebook is bad; but if it wasn’t, the incentive structures of journalism would make it look bad anyway.
The bully does not create the victim—the victim creates the bully. Of course, plenty of victims genuinely deserve to be bullied. But deserving is not an incentive.
Other cases of oligarchic coordination
This is interesting, because we also see other cases of apparent coordination where no obvious coordination mechanism exists. Some of them may even be more important.
For example: why the heck is everyone and everything getting all woke right now? No one ordered them to change their minds in this direction. Are they just opening their souls, independently, but at the same time, to the lovely light of reason? If so—why didn’t we all do that a long time ago? Maybe after that ‘80s Coca-Cola commercial?
Perhaps here we see another case of attractive coordination. Nazi Germany had a process called Gleichschaltung—which is sometimes even translated as coordination, and which simply meant forcing everything to be Nazi. There could be no soccer—only Nazi soccer. Soccer fans today are not at all familiar with this process.
Just kidding! Actually, as a proud American, who nonetheless lets his son play soccer, every Premier League game today opens with a kneeling benediction against racism, which is at apparently as dangerous as drugs were when I was his age. At least, we’re supposed to say the same word to it. They also wear armbands, etc—full Pyongyang.
What caused this to happen? Who is the Nancy Reagan of racism? Who ordered everyone to agree that racism is way worse than drugs? What would happen if Man United, Chelsea or even Brighton Hove Albion was like: “erm, actually, we’ve ‘ad a meetin’ and desoided as, drugs is woise. We’ll ‘av ‘at on the shirts, guvnor, eh?” And finally: what could this possibly have to do with anything that happened in Wisconsin? There are no good or obvious answers to any of these questions.
We cannot identify any sort of command structure in this rather startling instance of coordination on a literally global scale. Orthanc may shake, but the program will suffer not a hiccup when George Soros passes. The Elders of Zion are not regrouping on the Dark Web. No one and nothing is in the driver’s seat—this is true spontaneous order.
Maybe no power ordered this Wokeschaltung, as Goebbels ordered his Gleichschaltung. Maybe this extremely nonrandom pattern is another case of attractive coordination. Or to put it differently: perhaps the problem is the burgers, not the bears. Perhaps now, with the Internet, a bear can smell a bag of burgers from across the Atlantic.
Powerful ideas
To confirm this hypothesis, we need to find a power leak—a source of free power, like the free power available to anyone who can bully Facebook. But more. We’re looking at quite a forest of palm trees over here—so there must be some serious water around.
You’ve probably heard of the marketplace of ideas. Maybe you’ve even shopped there. Consider a small, important boutique in that market: the minds of tech journalists. These people are not hacks. They genuinely believe in their ideas. But they all buy their ideas in the same market.
In that market, an idea which is true has an advantage. So does an idea that is powerful—for example, the idea that Facebook is complicit in murder if it lets gamers say the “gamer word.” These powerful ideas excite the journalist and his readers—sometimes with some gastric discomfort, if their truth titers are just crazy low. Of course, the most successful ideas are both true and powerful. But frankly: how common is that?
Every marketplace of ideas is a Darwinian meme pool. What this tells us is that evolution in this pool doesn’t just select for truth, but also for power. You think Darwin’s lab is developing a therapeutic vaccine—it’s evolving a biological weapon.
A powerful idea is simply an idea that justifies the exercise of power. Powerful ideas are the building blocks of political formulas, which are ideas that justify the legitimacy of a government. In the 20th century, legitimate governments exercising power created far more mortality and morbidity than all pandemics put together. Of course, they did plenty of good things too.
Making an impact
If one were to recruit a group of wokies, carefully so as to not reveal any subversive intent, and ask them why it feels good to be woke, they would be slightly puzzled at the question. They certainly don’t associate their passionate commitment to social justice with anything so crass as mere pleasure. That’s what their bongs and vibrators are for.
But if you could calm this unease with a multiple choice test, like—(a) because I feel like I matter; (b) because it’s important to me to make an impact; (c) because I always wanted to change the world when I grew up; (d) because I believe we have to help other people; (e) all of the above—you probably would get a lot of (e).
What you would be getting is a several different versions, some franker than others, of: I like to feel powerful. And don’t we all. It definitely seems as if wokeness is a tree that grows well by the shores of a power-leakage pond. And there’s a lot of those trees.
What is leaking? What gives people the power to feel powerful? Only government—whose business it is to contain all the power—to maintain a monopoly of power. But if government did not do this business perfectly—it would leak. It would allow external forces to exercise power outside it—or even to exercise power over it.
For example, the Mafia makes a living by exercising power outside the government—if you have a business in the wrong part of New York, you pay two tax collectors. But the amount of winning available this way is dwarfed by the amount of winning available to any power that can get power over the government—which can, after all, do anything. And—does the government do anything that doesn’t leak?
Explaining the cathedral
Facebook leaks power and so does DC. They leak in extremely different ways. DC is a lot more complicated.
But the basic dynamic in the marketplace of ideas is the same. A power leak, which allows outside entities to capture power over the organization and/or its users, releases free power into the market. This power poisons the market—instead of a market for truth, it becomes a market for power.
No one can avoid playing this game and thinking the powerful ideas. Inevitably, the powerful ideas succeed in the market and become prestigious ideas.
All institutions which are part of the same marketplace of ideas must think the same ideas, which is why all our universities, newspapers, and foundations seem to agree with each other. Because we assume that these markets are markets for truth, we reason that this just means they are all very, very right. And sometimes they are.
The apparent redundancy of the whole network is completely factitious. There is no real room for intellectual heterogeneity among either institutions or individuals. It is all the same whether thirty universities, or one university, endorses some doctrine. Actually there is only one university anyway. Every sample has a sample size of one. They all agree with each other, not because they are all ordered to agree with each other, but because they are all chasing the same power leaks.
If we model all our prestigious intellectual institutions as a single institution—which some call the cathedral—and we ignore the atheistic character of its doctrines, it is very easy to observe the fundamentally theocratic nature of this form of government. Then again, America has been the world leader in theocracy for the last 400 years, since the Pilgrims came ashore and started burning witches. Maybe these things never change.
