i don’t tnink i’m exaggerating when i say that silicon valley has produced such a backwards and dangerously anti-human culture that it should be economically sanctioned and perhaps bombed
A long time ago, in the Age of Physical, software would be stored on beautiful mirrored discs, and inside each disc a tiny wizard lived who would install the software for you.
Influencers totally existed before 2011. If you were on myspace, you probably were aware of at least a dozen “big names” that today would be described as influencers. Just check The Cobrasnake/Cory Kennedy, for example.
But before Instagram became big, the most these people used to get was some invites to events, or popularity to boost [photography, modeling, music, writing… whatever their real offline career was]. No one really made any significant money just by posting stuff online.
Also, looking at the notes, you people heavily underestimate how popular internet was already in the late 00s. Of course it wasn’t “everybody is in there all the time” as it is right now, but for example, if you were under 30, by 2007 your way to communicate with everyone else was MSN messenger. Literally not being on messenger by then would have been considered as odd as not having a phone right now: teens and tweens would spent most of their home time at their family desktop PC, chatting with their friends.
While social media wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now, it become entirely normalized in the second half of the 00s. Hell, Tumblr itself was the equivalent of Instagram today before Instagram took that part of the community away.
this is all true but there was still a considerable social stigma if you were perceived to be online all the time. “internet culture” as such was still mostly the province of nerds and that only changed with the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and even more so with their monetization.
after elizabeth holmes and sam bankman-fried, it’s honestly crazy to me that anyone takes Silicon Valley freaks or their cheerleaders seriously. like these people can’t admit that lizzy holmes is more the rule than the exception!!!!!!
Imagine what would happen if the United States were to legalize the distribution and sale of heroin — and do so without any restrictions or regulations on how the drug is marketed and who can buy it.
Heroin distribution and sales would quickly become a huge, multibillion-dollar industry. They would become a significant part of GDP, even though heroin harms and often kills those who consume it. Given the increasingly naked corruption of U.S. politics, the heroin industry would be able to purchase massive political influence, enough to block any attempts to limit the harm it does — the harm it knows it does, because heroin industry executives would surely be aware of the damage their products inflict.
Through massive political donations — enabled by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling - and de facto bribery enabled via cryptocurrency deals, the industry would be able to enlist the U.S. government as an ally in its efforts to block regulation in other countries. For example, U.S. officials might threaten punitive tariffs against countries that try to limit and regulate heroin use.
If this story strikes you as extreme and implausible, here’s what you should know: replace “heroin” with “social media,” and this is a description of actual events.
Yesterday I wrote about how hostility to Europe is a central theme of the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy. The main driver of that hostility appears to be MAGA fury at the nations of Europe for being excessively protective of civil liberties and insufficiently racist.
A secondary source of anti-Europe sentiment, however, is the tech broligarchy’s fury at the European Union’s Digital Services Act. The Act obliges large platforms to self-police a variety of potential injurious effects ranging from “dissemination of illegal content” to “negative consequences” for “physical and mental well-being.”
Is comparing social media to a dangerous drug over the top? Not according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, which in 2023 released an advisory titled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health” (download it now before RFK Jr. suppresses it!), which summarized extensive evidence of mental health damage to children and adolescents who consume excessive amounts of social media.
Furthermore, the operators of these platforms know that they’re doing harm.
What makes this episode especially disturbing is that the U.S. government appears to be using its power to support the broligarchy’s fight against European regulation. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has explicitly linked U.S. tariffs on European steel to demands that Europe weakens its digital regulations. If the EU tried to make comparable demands on the United States, we’d consider it an outrageous infringement on our national sovereignty. And I’m pretty sure that making this linkage violates U.S. trade law too. But rule of law is for the little people.
The key point is that if you think of unregulated social media as dangerous drugs, as you should, then we’ve become a nation in which drug lords control much of government policy. Social media billionaires have enough power to prevent us from protecting our own children. They have enough power to dictate U.S. foreign policy, punishing our erstwhile allies for daring to limit their ability to push their product.
America has, in practice, become a digital narco-state.
I see where this is coming from but legalizing heroin would not cause the heroin business to explode and take over society. Heroin prices are kept artificially high now because heroin is illegal. They would crash after legalization. Selling legal heroin wouldn’t be any more profitable than selling say ibuprofen.
i think this is more based on the idea of a country pushing an extremely addictive substance on the rest of the world and then attempting to hold it hostage by force. maybe a more apt comparison would be the opium wars.
