Diatribes of Jay: How Advocates are Destroying Global Society, with Facebook in Front

[For some ways in which youth’s vote in the midterm elections could have improved its and its progeny’s future, click here. For how the midterms might have ended our American Civil War at last, click here. For ways to manage your media to avoid being duped and stay sane, click here. For a plea to Tim Cook to shape up Apple’s OS X before it goes the way of Microsoft’s consumer operating systems, click here. For how I voted early and why, and how easy it was to vote, click here. For a description of how mind-raping propagandists get people to vote against their own interests, click here. For all the reasons why the FBI’s “investigation” of Christine Blasey Ford’s claim of sexual abuse was a sham, click here. Fox sixteen reasons to vote this time for Democrats only, click here. For a note on the likely electoral consequences of the GOP ramming Kavanaugh through to the Supreme Court, click here. For a note on why the issue has become personal for many, click here. For a short note on how important Professor Ford’s charges are, click here. For comment on President Obama’s decision to join the political fray, click here. For a possible path to Trump’s impeachment and removal, click here. For comment on Trump’s deal with Mexico, click here. For a brief homage to John McCain, followed by reasons to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For a brief note on vote suppression in Georgia as a reason to support Stacey Abrams, click here. For other good candidates and causes and how to contribute easily, click here. For recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

For anyone who ever went to law school, the word “advocate” means one thing only: a lawyer or attorney. With Donald Trump a rare exception, people trained as lawyers comprise the vast majority of those who govern us, including members of congress, leaders of executive agencies, judges, and state and local pols.

But in the last century, the “profession” of advocacy has spread far beyond the bounds of the political arena, the law and those who practice it. Today we have many classes of advocates. They include: marketers of products and services, promoters of businesses and politicians, political “operatives,” lobbying firms, public relations specialists, “communications” professionals and so-called “crisis managers.” Every one of these workers and institutions has as their task getting the public or a class of people to see something or someone—a political party or movement, a company, a product or service, a politician, a human error or mistake, or a natural or artificial disaster—not as he, she or it is, but as the people who hired the advocate wants it to be seen.

In modern America, and in most of the free world, there are only four substantial classes of people dedicated to discerning and disseminating reality, i.e., finding the facts and following them wherever they lead. These groups are: scientists, engineers, accountants, and journalists. (I leave out criminal investigators like Robert Mueller because they serve the dual purposes of investigation and advocacy. They are, after all, attorneys who try cases if they think the facts so warrant.)

Each of these groups has its own rules and procedures—its own culture and law, if you will. Scientists hope to tease out how the physical and biological worlds work, using a specific formal process known as the “scientific method.” Then they report their findings to their peers and to the public, who review and verify or refute their conclusions. Engineers must make things that do useful work. If what they make doesn’t do useful work or costs too much, they modify, fix or improve it until it works better or costs less. Accountants verify whether what engineers and others do is useful, using profit as a proxy measure. If they don’t measure accurately, businesses can go bankrupt and/or bad actors can go to jail. Journalists find and report facts, primarily about people and their activities, under a code of accuracy and truthfulness relying primarily on multiple human sources and reporting and comparing different perspectives.

There is no simple, all-encompassing term, like “advocates” for their unlikes, to describe people who work in these four professions. “Truth seekers” sounds outmoded, almost religious. “Truth tellers” is presumptuous: being human, people in these categories can err, exaggerate, and even lie. But when they do, they are violating the canons for their respective professions and usually fall from grace. In contrast, when advocates come close to the line of lying—or cross it, as our president has done many times—they are rewarded and promoted, whatever they say, if only they change minds as ordered.

Advocates’ goal is not advancing our collective knowledge of each other and our common universe. It’s delivering to their clients some sort of power over us, controlling what and how we think and believe and thereby (indirectly) how we vote and act. The four other professions try to keep us in touch with some semblance of reality. So let’s just call them “reality-checkers.”

With these points in mind, we can see precisely how and why the current controversy over Facebook has existential implications for our entire human species. That controversy now sits at the nexus of four millennial megatrends that will set our future path and may ultimately fix or forfeit our species’ survival.

The first megatrend is the gradual transition of human governance from nation-states (and their agglomerations, like the EU) to rule by corporations. I’ve described this transition in several essays, including this one and this one, and won’t repeat the analysis here. But the outlines are easy to summarize in four points. First, corporations have the money, while increasingly debt-ridden states do not. Second, corporations have the expertise and the necessary specialization, the more so as human life and human work become increasingly complex and specialized with the advance and spread of science and technology. Third, with their rules for using their products and services, corporations “govern” where people live, below and sometimes under general principles fixed by states’ constitutions and laws. Finally, the development and spread of science and technology, and the accelerating innovation they foster, make it impossible for traditional governments to keep up, even if they had the money, expertise and power, which often they don’t.

The second megatrend is in part a consequence of the first. Corporations increasingly make the rules under which individuals mostly live their lives. They do so in their contractual language, the way they handle disputes, mistakes and customer dissatisfaction, and the ways (rapidly increasing) in which they try to handle these things automatically, without human intervention, or at least often without intelligent human intervention.

As in many things, the United States is in the vanguard of this second megatrend. Our most foundational legal principles—those in our Constitution and its Bill of Rights—simply don’t apply to action by any private corporation or individual. Except as made more widely applicable in statutes (such as those prohibiting discrimination), these principles restrict only “state action.”

Recently our American Supreme Court has underlined this point. It has allowed corporations to remove the entire American legal system from consumers’ and customers’ reach as such with a simple expedient: including a clause requiring private arbitration in form contracts. In addition, we are now in the beginning stages of a mammoth legal battle over whether corporations and even powerful individuals can restrict or even extinguish individuals’ supposed “right” to freedom of speech by including gag clauses in contracts or requiring nondisclosure agreements. The president’s attempt to enforce a nondisclosure agreement against the porn star Stormy Daniels is just one of thousands of examples of this modern phenomenon. (The EU appears to be flirting with a countertrend, both with its international competition (antitrust) rules built into its governing treaties and its recent international privacy regulation. But it remains to be seen how much success these small countertrends will have and whether they will enjoy global adoption.)

The third megatrend is the current explosion of the advocacy professions in numbers, influence, affluence and power, largely at the expense of the reality-checkers. The wanton murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi is just the most recent and sensational evidence of this trend. Donald Trump’s absolute disdain for science and scientists is of equal concern. More subtle and insidious is the slow but steady transition in the corporate world, just as corporations collectively are assuming more and more of the power to govern ordinary people’s private lives by contract.

A century or more ago, engineers began and ran America’s great industrial corporations. The very corporate names reflect the skill and prominence of their founders: Carnegie (who adapted the Bessemer Converter to make steel in America), Bell (whose name graced many telephone companies before the breakup of the old AT & T), Ford (who invented the assembly line and with it America’s consumer society), and Edison (whose name still adorns many American electric utilities). Today, most great corporations are run by lawyers, financiers and business-school graduates, many of whom could not fix, let alone design or build, their corporations’ products or produce their services. With Steve Jobs having passed and Elon Musk now removed as CEO of Tesla, it looks as if the advocate class may have taken over modern American industry.

This megatrend includes yet another disturbing social development, which may now be in the process of starting to self-correct. For decades, business schools have taught their students that the primary and even sole function of a corporation is to make money for its shareholders.

Combined with the trend toward more advocates and fewer reality-checkers running corporations, this teaching has had some predictable but severe consequences. When you are the developer of a new product or service (usually an engineer of some sort), your first concern is with the product or service, its success and improvement. When you are an advocate selling someone else’s product or service, your first and only criterion of success is likely to be the money you make, both for your company and for yourself. Furthermore, if you are not an engineer or the product developer, but are skilled at managing people, your first resort to solving a big problem may be to make it appear to go away, rather than to solve it. Your own training, the profit-only orientation you learned in business school, and the press of circumstances may conspire to make you an advocate, rather than a reality-checker.

The fourth and final megatrend of our new millennium relates to the Internet and specifically to Facebook. Our species is now experiencing the greatest-ever explosion of communication, in media and forms that are mostly uncontrolled and may be uncontrollable. Much of that communication is unique in kind, not just volume. For example, Facebook’s platform involves so-called “many-to-many” communication, in which many people may be authors or producers, contemporaneously if not simultaneously, and many more may be readers or viewers. In this form of communication, there is seldom a gatekeeper or arbiter of accuracy or quality. Often there is not even a copy editor.

There is no practical restriction on the number of originators or the number of consumers of many-to many communications over the Internet.

Here Facebook is absolutely in the vanguard of the megatrend. Unless the originator of a Facebook page otherwise mandates in the page settings, there is no practical limit on how many individuals can post on that page or how many can read the posts, including real or fake photos and real or fake audio and video clips. And owners of pages—whether corporations trying to expand their ranges of customers or authors trying to expand their audiences—have no incentive to impose restrictions.

In this respect Facebook best exemplifies the full impact of the many-to-many communication mode that previously had been just a theoretical use of the Internet. It permits many more participants than, for example, e-mail, which is limited by the need to insert individual “mailing” addresses, and product reviews or readers’ comments on news or opinion articles, which are limited to particular subject matter, namely, the product or the subject of the article.

At the dawn of the Internet, in the 1990s, commentators focused on the ability of this technology to do good. It can promote democracy and group-building, they reasoned, by taking a powerful means of communication outside of the control of any gatekeeper. But in fact that complete freedom has given way to license, as people unleashed from any restraint—including accuracy, truth, decency, and empathy—have formed flash mobs and hate groups and given undeserved credence to a myriad of conspiracy theories and crackpot ideas.

Facebook and its technology are vital harbingers of our species’ future because they are right at the center of all four of these megatrends. Facebook may not be the richest, most valuable or strongest of the “big five” technology giants, namely (in alphabetical order), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft. But it’s the only one that has definitely influenced and probably secured the election of an American president, the imminent departure of a key member of the European Union (leaving that nation at present in complete disarray), and the election of extreme right-wing leaders in Italy, Hungary, Poland, possibly in Brazil, and nearly in France. No other corporation has come so close to demonstrating the practical passage of political and governmental power from nation-states to corporations.

As for rules that practically govern our daily lives, what promises to have a greater impact than Facebook’s rules for who may use its fora and what they may say? Freedom of speech is useless and illusory unless you have a forum that gives you an audience. That’s why our Supreme Court, over the years, has recognized even certain private property, such as malls, as “public fora” in which the Constitution guarantees free speech.

As compared to these limited physical spaces, Facebook gives various speakers, from corporations, through crackpots to the President of the United States, unprecedented fora in cyberspace, without any physical or much cultural or legal restraint. Those fora, at present and by far, comprise the most powerful means of many-to-many communication ever developed.

So the legal and corporate rules for their use will dictate whether the freedom of speech, religion and assembly that our First Amendment purports to guarantee remain realities or become practical charades. And the misuse of whatever freedom Facebook in its corporate wisdom allows will determine, among other things, whether the pogroms once so common in Europe and Stalinist Russia will become as common in today’s America as they once were against blacks in our post-Reconstruction South.

As for the third megatrend—the growing predominance of advocates over reality checkers—Facebook’s own internal corporate governance exemplifies it. Mark Zuckerberg was the developer of Facebook’s software platform and is still its majority shareholder. So he’s the nearest thing in Facebook’s top management to a member of the engineering clan of reality-checkers.

Yet in responding to valid (and so far rather mild) assertions of Facebook’s responsibility for, if not complicity in, catastrophic political and social earthquakes, advocates like CEO Sheryl Sandberg and her team have pushed Zuckerberg aside and controlled Facebook’s response. They’ve overwhelmed whatever engineering influence Zuckerberg may have asserted and pushed relentlessly for a policy of advocacy. They’ve tried to make the problem seem less than it is. They’ve pointed fingers at competitors in order to secure a competitive advantage. They’ve done everything but see and confess a dismal reality: that Facebook now stands at the center of a species-critical problem of hate speech, online mob formation, disinformation, and “fake news” that eventually will require an “all hands on deck” approach using technical means, money, people and, yes, regulation to solve.

For evidence of this point, you need look no further than the New York Times’ 2.2-full-page exposé of Sandberg’s and Facebook’s response to governmental and press attention. To Zuckerberg’s credit as a putative engineer, he sat “stone-faced, [and] whirred through technical fixes” at a key board meeting. Yet Sandberg and her team persisted with a program of the three Ls: lawyering, lobbying and (essentially) lying. Like many of the business leaders responsible for the Crash of 2008, Sandberg has a background in economics, finance, and business, but none in engineering or software. She is therefore only following her training in advocacy.

The final megatrend that Facebook exemplifies is the explosion of many-to-many Internet communication like a nuclear weapon over human society. Here Facebook is not just part of the trend. It exemplifies it. Facebook is by far the most widespread and powerful example of the technology globally, the one most successful technically and financially, and the one most closely associated with catastrophic (and mostly unpredicted) social and political earthquakes.

Almost every development in technology can work for either good or ill. Despite their awful carnage and lasting radioactivity, nuclear weapons stopped the world’s most terrible war, without a bloody and prolonged invasion of Honshu. They have kept the peace among major powers for over three-quarters of a century. Yet they almost extinguished our species in October 1962, and the threat of their doing so still remains serious and growing.

Just so, Facebook’s innovative medium of communication has the potential to bring people together for the common good. It did so in the Arab Spring, which, although failed, was the first green shoot of democracy in the now-war-devastated Arab world. Yet no one anticipated the extent to which that potential to bring people together could be used to divide a peaceful world (including America!) into warring tribes, promote hate and pogroms, and put utterly unqualified right-wing bullies in high office globally. In the long run Facebook has the potential to be just as devastating as nuclear weapons, either by allowing fateful divisions that lead to actual nuclear conflict or by getting us humans to neglect the greatest self-caused challenge in our species’ history, namely, global warming.

Some 36 years ago, another corporation experienced a sudden challenge of a different kind. A maniac, still unknown, put cyanide in some of Johnson & Johnson’s bottles of then-leading painkiller Tylenol. Seven people died from taking the poisoned tablets. Sales plunged.

The firm’s CEO, James E. Burke, was the product of a business school, just like Sheryl Sandberg. But unlike Sandberg, he was a CEO of the old school.

Burke instructed his team to save the people first, and only then the product. So Johnson & Johnson recalled the entire nation’s supply of Tylenol, all 31 million bottles, at a loss of over $100 million. Then the company introduced bottles with triple tamper-proof seals and slowly, painfully and expensively restored Tylenol to its leading place in the over-the-counter painkiller market that it still enjoys today. If J & J had responded to its “Tylenol crisis” with the same inaction and defensive advocacy with which Facebook has responded to its global misuse crisis, hundreds or thousands of additional innocent people might have died of cyanide poisoning.

As for me, I’ve never much liked or used Facebook. I consider its platform a piece of garbage software, virtually unusable compared to Amazon’s website or Google’s Gmail and Blogger. I’ve delayed deleting it only because of the midterm elections and software problems with Apple’s OS X. Once I’ve finished assimilating my new Google Pixelbook (on which I’m editing this post) and I’ve checked whether Facebook ever downloaded my data as promised, I plan to delete my Facebook account and expunge it from my computers and my life forever.

Institutions matter. The Catholic Church, with its authoritarian approach to God, astronomy and everything, delayed the advent of modern democracy and science for about a millennium—the last half of the first millenium and the first half of the second. It suppressed Galileo’s discovery that our Earth revolves around our Sun, and not vice versa. It delayed the development of modern medicine for centuries by forbidding dissection of cadavers in a search for knowledge of how the human body works.

As it begins its third millennium, our human species is on a cusp. It could be nearing a prolonged Golden Age, if we respect science and each other. We could halt the acceleration of global warming and work together to eliminate poverty, inequality and violence. In so doing, we could make life as much better for every human being, compared to today, as today’s life differs from the “nasty, brutish and short” lives of the first millennium. But if we dissolve into warring tribes, if we revel in magical thinking and superstition, if we credit fantastic and crackpot conspiracy theories, we could relapse into violence, extreme inequality and poverty and let rampant war and/or global warming destroy us and our planet.

Facebook has the potential to give us a strong push in either direction. But its current leaders don’t seem to care much which way they push, as long as they are making money. Therefore it’s up to our government and the rest of us to encourage Facebook’s leaders to make the right choices, even if doing so requires a universal boycott, massive federal intervention, or rampant litigation over breaches of privacy, complicity or acquiescence in bigotry and terror, and simple misuse. The stakes are just too high to let the inertia and greed of a handful of pampered and self-interested business people set the direction of our species for this new millennium.

Endnote: Another reason to exclude criminal investigators/prosecutors like Mueller from the category of reality-checkers is transparency. The results of Mueller’s investigation of the President will not likely be made public unless he decides to prosecute or recommend prosecution (including impeachment). It is far more likely that Trump is just a lier, scoundrel and all-around sleazebag than a convictable or removable criminal. If so, then the results of Mueller’s investigation may never come to light.

That’s why public release of Trump’s tax returns is so important. They will show, with evidence prepared by his own hand (or his lawyers’), with a view to protecting his own income and interests, exactly how rich he is, how he makes his money, the extent to which he has lied, and how much he indeed is a scoundrel and sleazebag. Making that case is a lot easier than indicting a sitting president (which some legal experts say cannot be done), or removing one after impeachment when a majority of the Senate is of his own political party. Public proof of his true character might at least prevent the American public from again buying the proverbial “pig in a poke,” as it apparently did in 2016.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

Diatribes of Jay

17 November 2018

How Advocates are Destroying Global Society, with Facebook in Front

Links to Popular Recent Posts

0 Comments:

About Me

Previous Posts