Tag: OWS

Vicious Cycle – Speech Now Rewards the Oligarchs

I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, about the challenges and the opportunities facing the next generation — those millennials about whom everyone has a theory and whose attention everybody wants.  They are, after all, the next big generation, equalling the boomers at about eighty million with us Xers weighing in at a paltry fifty million.  But as the father of three of these so-called millennials, I’m not so much interested in them as a demographic, trying to understand their habits and tastes so I can figure out what to sell them and how to package it.  And I certainly worry about their entry into cyberspace, sharing information about themselves with Zuckerberg’s data mining organization before they reach adulthood.  But above all, I wonder whether or not millennials are up for the big social and political challenge of their age and whether or not us Xers are able to lead the charge. At the moment I’m not so hopeful in light of this report from Public Citizen entitled Mission Creep-y, explaining how Google is becoming an ultra-powerful political force and continuing to expand its “information collection empire.” Just the first few lines of the introduction reads as follows:

“Google may possess more information about more people than any entity in the history of the world. Its business model and its ability to execute it demonstrate that it will continue to collect personal information about the public at a galloping pace. Meanwhile Google is becoming the most prolific political spender among corporations in the United States, while providing less transparency about its activities than many other of its politically active peers. Despite its mantra – “Don’t be evil” – Google’s ever- growing power calls for keeping a close eye on the company, just as it is keeping a close eye on us.”

I do think the challenge of this half of this century is whether or not we’re going to allow the unfettered power of a new oligarchy to flourish.  Plutocrats have risen before in American history, but what is unique this time is that the means by which we perceive we can combat unchecked power actually waters the seeds of that power itself. To illustrate what I mean, let’s go back to Occupy Wall Street.  Remember Occupy?  It was trending not that long ago.  In my opinion, this series of protests was borne of anger and frustration with exactly the right problem — wealth consolidation.  For more than a half century now, Americans have fostered both policy and business culture that has resulted in a tiny fraction of society holding the greatest percentage of wealth.  Meanwhile, opportunity continues to shrink for everyone else — the 99% championed by OWS.  Thus, the targets of Occupy were the financial industry and the government that failed first to regulate and then to punish those who practiced predatory and fraudulent schemes that led to near economic collapse five years ago.  This particular rage aimed at those particular institutions was a reasonable start, but the narrative written by OWS actually contains an ironic twist I doubt many of its founders or followers ever considered before, during, or since those days in Zuccotti Park.

If we’re going to be honest, OWS produced nothing tangible to address the fundamental problem of wealth consolidation in the U.S.  No serious grassroots political force was founded, no OWS-backed candidates were elected to office, no dialogue has even really changed much as a result of those protests.  Instead, what OWS produced was a great deal of theater. And that’s normal.  Protests always produce some measure of theater that doesn’t translate into progress, which doesn’t mean protests don’t serve a purpose.  The irony, however, with this particular spectacle in the age of social media, this free show comprised of shared photos, videos, tweets, and updates about kids tussling with city police, was that it could not exist without putting money into the pockets of the wealthiest one percent of the one percent. For every one of us who watched a video of Officer Bologna pepper spray a young woman and thought, “that’s wrong” and then went about our day, the Internet billionaires made money. The top search result of that video alone has just under a million views on YouTube, and there are I don’t know how many related videos representing how many thousands of views.  But suffice to say that long after the goals of Occupy have been swept up with the detritus from the park, Silicon Valley’s elite few continue to make money from the from the free media circus performed in the name of restoring power to the many.  This Catch-22 scenario applies to just about any cause, any protest, any movement around the world.

I wrote broadly on this theme after supposed co-founder of OWS, now Google employee (yep), Justine Tunney called for a libertarian’s coup that would install Google chairman Eric Schmidt as chief executive of America. I really don’t think it’s alarmist to say that we are spawning a new generation of Vanderbilts with a social agenda that goes beyond mere greed, and that in the end, we won’t even get a railroad out of the deal.  But what is truly different about this era’s breed of Robber Baron is that this time he owns the medium through which we naively imagine we can protect our civil liberties against his caprice and callousness.  With every tweet, status update, an even blog post just like this one, we are feeding the very monster we think we’re fighting.  This is the real conundrum of our times and for the next generation to solve:  How do we speak truth to power when that power is made stronger by every word we say?

Coup du Jour – Eric Schmidt as CEO of America?

Image by RienkPost

In case you missed it, OWS co-founder, now Google software engineer, Justine Tunney is responsible for a petition calling for a coup d’etat that would hand over administrative authority of the United States to the tech industry and appoint Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt as CEO of America.  Whether Tunney is trying to be amusing, or she’s deranged, or she’s just another Twitter attention junkie, nobody is taking her too seriously if the comment section below the article in The Guardian is any indication.  In fact, this is one of those side-show moments that I questioned commenting on at all except for the unfortunate fact that so much of what now passes for discourse in the world  comprises so many side shows that mutate into headlines and round-table discussions on once-respectable news programs.  Even more relevant, though, is that even if Tunney herself is dismissible, her appeal might actually touch a few very real nerves running though the body of the American electorate.

For starters, the suggestion that any business leader ought to be president, that the presidency itself is like being a CEO, is a well-entrenched conservative idea also popular with many right-leaning libertarians.  Given that one of the universal complaints about government is that the elected are terrible stewards of “our money,” it’s a natural, albeit narrow-minded, instinct to want to elevate a successful business operator to the presidency so that he or she can “get our house in order.” On purely theoretical grounds, I have always quarreled with this premise because a corporation is not a democracy — I don’t care how flat you say your org chart is — so much as it is a benign dictatorship, usually designed to excel in a limited number of core competencies in the service of profitability.  Democracy isn’t efficient, giving everyone a voice isn’t efficient, balancing competing interests within a nation isn’t efficient; but inefficiency is one of the prices we pay for free speech, the right to redress the government, the right to assemble and organize, and so on.

Conversely, CEOs are conditioned toward efficiency and toward meeting quarterly goals for their shareholders.  As such, CEOs are not necessarily the best collaborators; they’re often not multi-dimensional thinkers; they frequently have egos way too big for Washington (which is saying something); and they’re not particularly oriented toward balancing the needs of the diverse and quarrelsome many. There are and have been CEOs who meet these criteria, but my point is that a strong P&L statement alone does not make a good resume for Leader of the Free World.  Interestingly though, while Tunney is standing on this weatherbeaten plank of the GOP, I think she’s simultaneously echoing sentiments among the left and libertarian left, who have come to think of technologies like social media as the antidote to corporate/government corruption and incompetence.  And this is where the bizarre confluence of Occupy zeal and the idea of appointing a less-than-one-percenter like Eric Schmidt as national leader might actually make some twisted sense in certain minds.

Occupy, after all, was a YouTube protest that was unfortunately almost as fleeting as that damn “What Does the Fox Say” video, and just about as likely to effect any tangible change in the world. At its core, I thought OWS began as a legitimate response to a genuine problem — wealth consolidation and the many systemic ways in which this economic cancer, eating away the middle class, is protected and perpetuated in the U.S.   But Occupy rather quickly manifest as the proverbial rebel without a clue — yet another social media side show in which the lead stories became a handful of viral videos depicting excessive force by certain police officers instead of a narrative relating any kind of clear, advancing agenda.  Thanks in part to the ephemeral nature of social media and its tendency to provoke an increase in conspiracy theory, the story of Occupy became the story of who was trying to shut it down rather than what it was meant to accomplish. Think OWS today, let alone years from now, and what probably remains are a few images of cops misusing pepper spray.  Imagine if all you could say about the civil rights movement is that some cops sprayed people with fire hoses.

Like it or not — and I certainly don’t — the Tea Party made Occupiers look like a bunch of fair-weather activists who seemed to think it was enough to conjure the illusion of a movement with all the trappings and also seemed to confuse mouse clicks with votes.  OWS generated images and buzz and “Likes” and a moment of fleeting outrage while the Tea Party got seats in the House of Representatives.  So, while Justine Tunney may be mockable for her hypocrisy, trying to trade on OWS bona fides from the rarefied heights of Googletopia and anointing the most corporate of corporate guys, the irony is that an event like OWS unwittingly does feed the pseudo-progressive trend toward a technocracy.  OWS was a functionally impotent movement with regard to addressing any serious issues, but one that simultaneously elevated the apparent relevance of citizens using smartphones and social media. By extension, this elevates the importance of the individuals who build those technologies.

In this sense occupy takes on an unintended second meaning.  While it was meant to express a contemporary sit-in whereby people occupy physical space as a form of protest, the millions of people passively engaged online were occupied in the sense that their attention was drawn particularly toward the aforementioned images of police misconduct.  While this is happening, the unseen irony is that the one percent of the one percent who own social media sites are saying “Ka-ching!” while many users are thinking, “Thank goodness for YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, or we would never know about these extraordinary (soon to be forgotten) events.”  Thus, I would argue that on at least a subconscious level, people come to think of a guy like Schmidt as a national leader of sorts.  It reminds me of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which the 19th Century man with his technological prowess is to be given a title that doesn’t quite acknowledge that he’s the most powerful person in the realm.  Arthur remains The King, Merlin remains The Wizard, and the technologically skilled Yankee is given the title The Boss.