Category: Politics

The War on Smart Continues with Firings at the Library of Congress and Copyright Office

copyright

Since the election, I have been so certain these events were coming that I almost pre-drafted this post, but I didn’t want to be a jinx. Then when it did happen, I hardly knew what to say. Every day, we are confronted with evidence that the only agenda of Trump 2.0 is wanton destruction. I am increasingly convinced that Trump himself is a mindless wrecking ball set in motion by cyberlibertarians like Peter Thiel, animated by the “Dark Enlightenment” ravings of Curtis Yarvin, and determined to raze America and on the wasteland, erect their fever-dream of techno-feudalist “corporate zones.” Of course, I only think that because that’s what they explicitly said they want to achieve.

Last Thursday, around 7:00pm Eastern, Trump fired Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, and then, on Saturday afternoon, he dismissed Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter. So, the first conflict in this shit-show (maybe) will be jurisdictional. Although the Librarian is a presidential appointee, the Library and Copyright Office comprise employees of the Legislature. Thus, a president doesn’t necessarily have the authority to fire Copyright Office or other Library staff, and as of yesterday, Trump appointees, Paul Perkins as acting Register and Brian Nieves as acting Deputy Librarian, were both turned away from the Library according to a story in Wired.

Trump also named his former defense counsel and current assistant AG Todd Blanche as acting Librarian, and other reports on social media stated that DOGE employees arrived at the Copyright Office and were also turned away. So, this is now a right and proper clusterfuck wholly consistent with the Trump brand of governance. Whether Congress will assert its authority in this mess is this week’s question along with the other question: Why?  Why aim the Trump wrecking ball at the Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office?

Dr. Hayden was a natural target for the hate-machine wing of the MAGAverse. She’s Black, an Obama appointee, and easy to accuse—and was accused—of fostering a “leftist DEI” agenda.[1] Notably, the White House email she received about her termination accused her of “putting inappropriate books in the library for children,” which is classic Trumpism—not only an invented allegation about Dr. Hayden, but one which highlights that these people have no idea what the Library of Congress is or does.[2]

Trump firing the Librarian of Congress is an attack on the institution consistent with other administrative attacks on cultural and scientific institutions throughout the country. Appointing a DOJ attorney to be acting Librarian signals hostility toward the purpose and meaning of the Library—a hostility in harmony with the rhetoric of Goebbels wannabe Stephen Miller, who talks about incubating a nationalist, “patriotic” culture. As any student of history knows, that’s a recipe for stupid—not just book stupid, but can’t feed oneself stupid. Today’s editorial in Time by Alondra Nelson, explaining her resignation from both the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress, makes the point. She writes:

In both these roles, over the past few years, I’ve been asked to serve on diverse bodies that offer guidance about how the Executive and Legislative branches can be stewards of knowledge and create structure to enable discovery, innovation, and ingenuity. In the instance of the National Science Board, this ideal has dissolved so gradually, yet so completely, that I barely noticed its absence until confronted with its hollow simulacrum.

The Copyright Office Debacle

The day before Register Perlmutter was fired, the Copyright Office released a “pre-publication draft” of its third report on copyright and AI—this one addressing training AI models with protected works. Because the Office does not release “pre-publication” drafts, it was clear as of late Saturday, that the report had been quickly distributed ahead of the anticipated firing of the Register. In this regard, Shira Perlmutter is owed a debt of gratitude for publishing the Office’s statement at a time when over 40 lawsuits are asking the courts to weigh the issue of AI training with protected works. But why was the report controversial and a likely catalyst in Trump’s desire to fire Perlmutter?

The pending third report made the AI developers anxious because, as with any report of its kind, the Office would aim to provide guidance on the legal considerations and implications without necessarily choosing sides. The AI developers have been lobbying hard in the press, and with appeals to the administration, to argue that training AI models with protected works is per se fair use. Further, they have argued as a matter of national interest that “winning” the AI competition with China is too important to allow copyright rights to interfere. Not that there’s any merit to that claim, but between Trump’s addle-minded concept of nationalism and the fact that he’s elbow-deep in Big Tech’s booty, copyright interests have been anxious since the inauguration that he might stick his mittens into the mix.

Meanwhile, at the end of April, Tom Jones of the right-wing American Accountability Foundation told the Daily Mail that it was time Trump, “…show Carla Hayden and Shira Perlmutter the door and return an America First agenda to the nation’s intellectual property regulation.” So, in addition to being a general dickhead about “leftist agendas,” Jones reiterates the incoherent proposal that America can hope to “lead” in IP while its Executive promotes brain drain across multiple sectors and attacks independent thought and diverse creativity wherever it can. Because attrition like the resignation of Alondra Nelson is exactly how you lose in IP, in case anyone’s keeping score.

So, Dr. Hayden’s ouster, packaged in the rhetoric of “anti-DEI,” is an attack on yet another cultural institution (one that houses the world’s largest collection), while the broadside at the Copyright Office may be solely about the reports on AI. Regardless, Trump gets to feed red meat to the MAGA nationalists and his Big Tech patrons at the same time, and where we are now is a lot of uncertainty pending chaos. Further, if Trump 2.0 is indeed designed to soften the ground for a techno-feudalist makeover, then tanking the creative economy would fit that agenda, as would allowing AI developers to build whatever they want without oversight of any kind.

One can only imagine who an illiterate, demented, and seditious facsimile of a president would tap as the next full-time Librarian of Congress—my money’s been on Kid Rock since November—but it will likely be someone whose idea of a national library roughly matches Pete Hegseth’s comprehension of national defense. Everything about Trump 2.0 mimics weak, authoritarian nations, including the aforementioned effort to foster a nationalist culture. To achieve that aim, authoritarians will always try to exsanguinate the professions supported by copyright law while they destroy evidence of historical fact and scientific discovery—a narrative housed within and symbolized by the Library of Congress.

Not since the British torched the place in 1814 have occupants of Washington shown so much contempt for America’s genuine capacity for greatness. More profound than the hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, removal of historical material from federal institutions and websites, or cutting the NEA budget, the concurrent dismissals of the Librarian and Register should be understood as an attack on the intent of the IP clause of the Constitution to “promote science and the useful arts.”

[1] As an aside, I criticized Dr. Hayden in 2016 for her improper and sudden ouster of then Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante, and I would likely still quarrel with her on that and other copyright matters today, but all that has nothing to do with these recent events.

[2] The Library houses the world’s largest collection of EVERYTHING. It is not comparable to a library in your local community.

Photo by Extender_01

The Information Age Broke the Republic

information age
I recognize the psychological need to believe the American Republic will survive the coming four years, and I freely admit to being the biggest cynic in almost any room. But if the analogy is a shipwreck, we are already treading water with no ship or shore on the horizon. “Democracy lives in the people,” say the more hopeful pundits. Perhaps. But while it may be true that the spirit of personal liberty lives in the people, that is not the same thing as recognizing that the foundations of American democracy were rejected by the people.
 
Tomorrow, a man who showed violent contempt for the Constitution will repeat the oath to protect and defend the Constitution, and the flags decorating the very Capitol he attacked will lead many to think this is still the United States. It is not. Now begins the story of an ersatz America (an Idiots’ Interregnum) where the nation floats unmoored from the rationales for its own existence. The question, therefore, is not survival but revival. Can the Republic be restored after the electorate decides it no longer matters?
 
The first time Trump was elected, I argued that this represented a vote of no confidence in the Republic, and not only would I double down on that assessment today, I believe that same faithlessness has long been evident on the far left and the far right. MAGA claims to defend the Constitution and lies about its meaning while many young Progressives shrug at the Constitution as an anachronism not worth defending. Driving both sentiments is a dangerous level of constitutional illiteracy amplified by the so-called information age and weaponized by masters of the technology. When Madison et al. studied the fates of republics and democracies to learn what makes them fail, they could not have imagined a technology that would one day confound reality itself at the speed of light.
 
It is difficult in any society to distinguish policy from political theater, but the phenomenon is acutely frustrating in a nation this important, where the population knows more mythology than history. Trump personifies that illiteracy—a consequence of both classic illiteracy (i.e., a failure to teach) and cultural illiteracy (i.e., a loss of faith in core principles). In combination, these traits make a mockery of our sacred words, and when Trump takes the oath he already violated, the promise he apes back to the Chief Justice will be purely performative. If the President’s Oath of Office is just for show, whose oath matters? The implications, rippling out to the clerk of the smallest town in the smallest county, are toxic to a nation that was literally invented with words and kept by generations of Americans vesting those words with meaning.
 
The United States has always been a work of paradoxical genius. More than any nation, its identity is an idea expressed in highly intellectual terms securing the right of every citizen to remain blissfully ignorant about the underlying principles of that idea. The First Amendment, the Progress Clause, and the writings of the key founders all express a foresight that upholding the Constitution would require a broad literacy not easily attained by a whole nation. Today, that original paradox is manifest in the fact that immigrants seeking citizenship get better civics educations than most natural born citizens.
 
For the native citizen, we instill constitutional illiteracy at an early age with flashcard concepts that rarely mature as our students do. For instance, the short answer to the 2nd Amendment flashcard has always been “the right to bear arms,” a textual redaction eliding an important national security debate at the founding period that, if taught, would inform a richer understanding of history and the Bill of Rights. This needlessly controversial example begs the question as to whether Americans could ever have achieved core constitutional literacy without condemning that education as either “liberal indoctrination” or “white colonialist values.”
 
Not every American—indeed almost no American—is inclined to spend hours with The Federalist or comb through Elliott’s Debates or deep-dive into the classical education that informed the framers. But basic civics literacy does not require so much academic rigor. A fourth grader can understand, for example, the difference between the state censoring speech and a private party rejecting speech. But in recent years, law school graduates serving in Congress or working at “digital rights” organizations have willfully alleged speech censorship in contexts that are aberrations of the constitutional right.
 
Of course, we Americans often overstate ourselves with words like “patriot” or “traitor” when what we really mean is political agreement or disagreement. Occasionally, an adult steps up, as Senator McCain famously did during the debate with Senator Obama to correct a woman who called Obama a traitor. But that kind of dignity is now either forgotten or scorned. We have thrown open the Overton Window, defenestrated patriots like McCain, Gore, Pence, Liz Cheney, et al. in favor of seditionists, felons, lunatics, and the patently unqualified. And I will die on the hill arguing that the catalyst of this clusterfuck is the information age—not merely driven by profit, but by a mad, narcissistic ideology sold to the public as “freedom.”
 
The words that define and shape the United States are now about as meaningful as the hashtags and memes that have diluted both denotation and connotation in that “sea of irrelevance” called social media. For more than a decade, often “liberal” tech-utopians insisted that a wall of separation protected real life from the “Wild West” of cyberspace, assuring us that the worst aspects of the latter would not have any tangible effect on the former. To say otherwise was to earn the name “Luddite,” and there will be no apology from Big Tech’s evangelicals at EFF et al. A few Silicon Valley refugees offered their mea culpas the first time they noticed the experiment escaping the lab circa 2017, but those voices, like real Republicans, have been marginalized. 
 
Now, the destruction wrought by the information age is holistic. With Senate confirmations of dangerously unqualified political hacks like Hegseth, Bondi et al., the disease of constitutional illiteracy is now its own mandate. Yes, the former GOP (whatever one calls it) is craven and cultish, but it could only have been led there because the idea of American democracy is indeed not alive in quite enough of the people. And because all death is brain death, the idea of America dies when too many people applaud empty slogans like “warrior culture,” rather than engage in adult conversation about what the military, or any department, actually does. This is where the digital revolution has led a great nation.
 
Real life now mirrors cyberspace, where fools become kings. And so, we are a silly, childish nation playing with dangerous toys. America is running with scissors, and the information age that brought us to this moment offers little more than a video clip of the toddler about to impale himself. If there had truly been an information revolution, then Trump would have been the civics lesson America needed instead of the civics test America failed. It was an easy test — i.e., don’t elect people who tried to overthrow the Constitution. But that’s what happened. And the fact that tens of millions of Americans don’t believe, or perhaps don’t care, that it happened is because the information age broke the Republic.

The End of Fact-Checking at Facebook is Ideologically Consistent

fact-checking

The announcement that Meta will stop fact-checking material on its platforms is neither surprising nor, at this point, relevant. Mark Zuckerberg’s absurd announcement that the company is “getting back to core principles,” or whatever bullshit way he said it, is no more appalling today than that same rhetoric has been for decades. None of this conduct is news or purely about sucking up to Trump (though that is certainly a factor). Cyberlibertarian ideology, which is much older than Zuckerberg, has long relied on a rhetorical tactic by which Big Tech sells the public the idea that its business purposes enhance or support democratic principles while pursuing an agenda that is exclusively anti-democratic. And the public has a long history of falling for this shell game.

It is accurate but incomplete to say that when X or Facebook mothballs internal accountability this is motivated by profit. To be sure, Big Tech’s PR and lobbying assault on the very idea of regulation, whether by government or its own policies, is partly driven by the financial value of frictionless platforms. Thus, the tedious reiteration that we must “Save the internet!” from Policy X or Regulation Y, usually paired with alleged defenses of the speech right, have long masked the truth that allowing conspiracy theories, lies, hate speech, harassment, foreign propaganda, and material harmful to children is profitable. And like the NRA’s playbook, these harms are repackaged as the price we pay for a “free and open internet.”

So, yes, that message is motivated by money, but it is about more than money. Zuckerberg, in describing the decision to stop fact-checking as a move back to “core principles,” is merely fulfilling his destiny as a young cyberlibertarian, heir to a bizarre philosophy that is authoritarian at its core. Hence, the complaint that Meta does not care whether it harms democracy misses the trick that harm to democracy is the goal and not a byproduct. That harm will level up (though not to its zenith) on January 20th, when a felon will retake the Oath of Office he already violated while millions of citizens participate in an ersatz America brought to you by Silicon Valley’s new and improved democracy of the screen.

In nearly every article on this subject since 2012, I have tried to present variations on the theme that whatever policy matter may be the issue of the moment, Big Tech’s underlying opposition is not limited to the proposal itself but to the idea that government should even function as the instrument of democracy. No surprise that David Golumbia articulates this sleight of hand so clearly when he writes, “We seem to be talking about copyright, freedom of speech, or the ‘democratization’ of information or some technology. But if we listen closely, we hear a different conversation that questions our right and ability to govern ourselves.” That’s it in a bombshell. And although other industries (e.g., tobacco and fossil fuel) have adopted this same rhetoric, no industry has ever had so much power to control the message—let alone to argue that the messenger itself is the messiah of liberty.

While the traditional libertarian views democratic institutions as obstacles to liberty, the cyberlibertarian advocates digital technology as the workaround which obviates the need for those institutions. This, as stated many times, is the premise under which Big Tech’s anti-copyright agenda was sold to the public as a “right of access and speech” stifled by government’s authority to write copyright law. The access/speech narrative, which appeals in different forms to both right and left sensibilities, disguised the fact that Silicon Valley both objects to copyright enforcement as a business interest, but also to the principle that Congress should protect creators’ rights as an ideological matter.

Cyberliberatarianism, which guides (I would say infects) the minds of far too many tech leaders and tech industry evangelists, scorns the mechanisms of government as an inefficient and clunky way to run a society. And the profoundly unqualified Elon Musk, as the putative new head of “national efficiency,” is a manifestation of this same magical thinking. But who bought the bullshit? Who believed that digital technology can and should operate as the alternative to a functional representative government? Everyone. Left, right and center.

Yes, there are some prominent voices we can blame for carrying the cyberlibertarian flag, and these include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Public Knowledge, Senator Wyden, Niskanen Center, Techdirt, Mike Masnick, Daphne Keller, Eric Goldman, Computer and Communications Industry Association, Cory Doctorow, Ed Snowden, Jonathan Band, Julian Assange, American Library Association, Brewster Kahle, John Perry Barlow, Eric Schmidt, the Cato Institute, and, at least in this context, the American Civil Liberties Union, to name a few representatives familiar to both liberals and conservatives.

Those parties, and far too many academics anointed with Silicon Valley oil, have all preached the cyberlibertarian gospel by advocating conveniently vague notions like “innovation” (appealing to conservatives) and “digital rights” (appealing to liberals). The former is a catch-all for the talking point that “regulation stifles innovation,” a thesis which never bothers to define either term. One need only watch the squabbles over AI to see this history repeating itself, with Big Tech arguing the deterministic importance of AI against any kind of statutory checks that might, for instance, bar the use of AI to exacerbate false information about real persons.

As for “digital rights,” if one wonders what distinguishes these rights from traditional civil rights, it’s a good question elided by the rhetoric of those who invented the term. That said, “digital rights” consistently include a presumed right to free and unfettered access to everything; a presumed right to remain anonymous under all circumstances; and the maximalist view that all material posted online, no matter how harmful, should be treated as protected speech. That these “rights” contradict the administration of civil rights everywhere other than cyberspace is an inconvenient truth that remains un-addressed.

In combination, these cyberlibertarian “core principles” add up to zero accountability for digital tech corporations promoting the illusion that their products foster greater accountability from the real enemy of liberty—democratic government. This is how I believe the ordinary imperfections of government became so much fuel for galloping conspiracy theories and preposterous narratives that rage across the web like a California wildfire. But if we vote as if the government is the enemy, then eventually it will be. And in this light, Meta’s announcement that it will shit-can accountability is not a pivot to the right, but a continuation of a long goose-step toward the far right that has been baked into that industry’s ideology for generations.

Assuming we will not all simultaneously cancel Facebook in protest, perhaps we can at least stop doing Big Tech’s bidding every time a policy proposal is made that the industry opposes. Whether the issue is Section 230 reform, artificial intelligence, countering mass piracy, image-based sexual abuse, child safety, etc., it might at least help if we reject any messaging promoted under that tiresome and disingenuous headline that we risk “losing the internet as we know it.” Facebook’s latest announcement is just another example that we can afford to take exactly that risk.