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      in World Politics

      When Technology Cancels Anonymity

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      Only days after The Washington Post’s startling revelations of abuse by various governments using Israeli firm NSO’s Pegasus spyware, Axios reports on the case of a Catholic Church official in the US, Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who resigned after being shamed as apparently gay by the Catholic news outlet The Pillar. The publication claims to have conducted an investigation that involved considerable expense. It required purchasing a trove of data that had been analyzed by a technically qualified consulting firm to charge its victim.

      Concerning the collection of personal data, technology providers are required to protect the identity of users by formatting the data in such a way that, even when all the details of a person’s behavior are analyzed to produce a consumer profile, the user’s identity remains hidden. To solve this problem, The Pillar’s team worked in two stages. 

      The first stage consisted of purchasing data from a firm that exercises the new profession that Tech Crunch refers to as “data brokers.” The data in question is the result of tracking the user’s behavior while using apps or consulting internet sites. Data brokers collect and store the result of that permanent tracking before selling it to advertisers who can then “profile you, understand your tastes, your hobbies and interests, and use that information to target you with ads.”

      Is Spying an Art or a Crime?

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      The data thus serves to create consumer profiles. The brokers may not legally associate the data they sell with named individuals. They must anonymize the data before selling it to a third party. But inevitably, among the mass of behavioral information collected, clues will be present enabling anyone with the requisite time, patience, analytical skills and sheer animus to make the attribution.

      Once the data was in its hands, The Pillar hired consultants to set about deciphering it to identify a culprit. The consultants narrowed down all the connections, including geographical data, that eventually led with near-absolute precision to the individual The Pillar suspected, Msgr. Burrill. Not only did The Pillar carry out the investigation in what it deemed to be the public interest, it immediately reported it, thereby shaming the victim and forcing him to resign.

      Axios points out that awareness of the ethical issues linked to this system of recording and marketing the behavior of individuals is not new. “Privacy experts have long raised concerns about ‘anonymized’ data collected by apps and sold to or shared with aggregators and marketing companies.” This may, however, be the first time those concerns have proven justified. “Some privacy experts,” according to The Washington Post, “said that they couldn’t recall other instances of phone data being de-anonymized and reported publicly.” The experts add “that it’s not illegal and will likely happen more as people come to understand what data is available about others.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      De-anonymize:

      Undertake a complex process of data manipulation for the noble purpose of publicly shaming (or blackmailing) someone whose behavior one doesn’t condone

      Contextual Note

      Axios explains why this affair is significant: “The small Catholic outlet, The Pillar, was able to achieve this by obtaining ‘anonymized’ data from a broker, and having a consulting firm analyze it and link it to the church official — showing how easy and legally this can now be done.” In the age of cancel culture, we finally have the ideal toolset to get the job done.

      What was the monsignor’s crime that justified The Pillar’s “investigation”? As it reports, “Burrill’s mobile device shows the priest … visited gay bars and private residences while using a location-based hookup app in numerous cities from 2018 to 2020.” That is something the public definitely needs to know.

      Unique Insights from 2,500+ Contributors in 90+ Countries

      “No federal laws prohibit buying this data,” The Post reminds its readers. One expert cited by The Post explains that users “have no idea where this data actually lives. But it’s out there, and it’s for sale.” That may sound shocking, but it corresponds to a deeper logic at the core of today’s economic culture. The syllogism goes like this. Premise one: Data has value. After all, it is the key to Google’s and Facebook’s prosperity. Premise two: Anything that has value can be sold. In any commercial setting, it is likely to be sold. Conclusion: Data, however damaging its dissemination may be, will be sold and then either exploited for another purpose or disseminated. This correlates with another law of modern economics: If you don’t sell what has value, you are a loser.

      Making money out of data has become the first principle and the central axiom of what we call “the information society.” Data is a valuable commodity. Human dignity and social integrity may be worthy ideals, but they will always be deemed secondary because they cannot be transformed into a commodity. The Pillar understands that principle and calls that choice “investigative reporting.”

      Historical Note

      In 1974, the distinguished 69-year-old French theologian, Jesuit cardinal and elected member of the French Académie, Jean Danielou, died in the apartment of a young female “friend.” The 24-year-old blonde was known to have financial problems. In particular, she hoped to pay for a lawyer for her Corsican husband in prison for pimping. Gilberte worked in a bar frequented by underworld figures, where she went by the name of Mimi or Gaby. Some suspected she had different ways of supplementing her income.

      Monsignor Danielou was said to have been a frequent visitor to her apartment. At the time of his death, he had 3,000 francs on his person. (New York governor and Republican presidential contender Nelson Rockefeller appears to have died in a manner similar five years later.) The French media, often with a touch of irony, noted these facts and assumed that the truth may have been slightly different than the official explanation, that the theologian was paying a pastoral visit to his friend in need, Gilberte.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In its account, the French newspaper Le Parisien noted that five years before his death, Danielou had proclaimed that “sexuality is a gift of God,” adding: “I understand personally that certain priests may be sensitive to the beauty and charms of a woman.” He insisted that “we expect too much from a priest since he is only a man.”

      In an article in the National Catholic Reporter, theologian Steven P. Millies explains the ethical principle The Pillar seems to ignore: “I am a sinner. So are you. So is Msgr. Jeffrey Burrill. Not one of us has a personal life that would withstand the sort of scrutiny The Pillar has applied to Burrill.” Millies identifies a problem that goes beyond the question of the ethics of the Catholic clergy and is of particular concern in American society today. The mission to shame and cancel other people has become perversely elevated to the status of an act of virtue.

      Millies cites Canon Law: “No one is permitted to harm illegitimately the good reputation which a person possesses nor to injure the right of any person to protect his or her own privacy.” While exposing other people’s sins harkens back to the Puritanical roots of the Anglo-Saxon American experiment, the role of technology has turned this nasty trait into an authentic social plague.

      In the European Catholic tradition, sexual excess (lust) has always been considered one of the seven deadly sins. It has also been the one easiest to forgive and the most prone to being charitably confused with the ultimate virtue in Christian ethics, love. If Don Giovanni (Molière’s Don Juan) — an ancient but less slimy version of Harvey Weinstein — deserves his final plunge into hell, Christian audiences can’t help secretly sharing Leporello’s admiration for his accomplishments (“mille et tre”). After all, unlike Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein, the Don carried them out with style.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In the case of Cardinal Danielou, the French media and people took the case in stride, laughing about the embarrassing allegations. Charlie Hebdo and the Le Canard Enchainé stand as exceptions since both are always ready to mercilessly exploit any apparent hypocrisy for humor. But on the whole, the French avoided impugning the reputation of an authentic thinker who, though a conscientious priest, was also a man and, therefore, a sinner.

      Sam Sawyer S.J., the senior editor of the Jesuit publication “America,” pinpoints the outcome of The Pillar’s article by noting that “what the church is left with is the specter of effectively unlimited retroactive surveillance, deployed under private direction at The Pillar’s discretion for the purpose of policing failures in celibacy through the threat of public disclosure.” 

      More broadly, society is left with a similar specter of “unlimited retroactive surveillance” by anyone, public or private, with the financial means to carry it out and an undisclosed motive for doing so. In such circumstances, Monsignor Burrill’s real sins and other people’s crimes may be exposed, but the notion of trust within the community will be the ultimate victim. In an era in which social media is used for increasingly aggressive antisocial behavior, trust was already on the defensive. Thanks to our deteriorating social climate crisis that parallels in intensity the physical climate crisis, trust may be the first species to go extinct.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in World Politics

      Is Spying an Art or a Crime?

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      The New York Times on Monday reported that the US has accused China “of breaching Microsoft email systems used by many of the world’s largest companies.” On the same day, The Washington Post announced the findings of an investigation into “spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals.” The Pegasus spyware supplied by the Israeli firm NSO targeted “journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” as well as three sitting presidents and three current prime ministers, a king and a host of high-profile officials around the world.

      With American troops wending their way home from the 20-year-long hot war in Afghanistan, the new cold war that recently became a dominant theme in American electoral politics has taken a curious turn. The original Cold War had meaning because it appeared to be a largely equitable match between the United States and the Soviet Union. That changed with the implosion of the USSR in 1991. What didn’t change was the psychological dependence of American administrations on their ability to identify existential threats from abroad. What better way, after all, to distract from the growing disarray visible within its own society?

      Are Americans Waiting for a Cyber Apocalypse?

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      The decade that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrated the scope of the problem. In his 2000 presidential campaign, grammatically challenged George W. Bush lamented the fact that the nation had lost the reassuring feeling of living in “a dangerous world” in which “you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was.” Bush was nevertheless convinced that there was an enemy on whom the nation could concentrate its fears.

      Just eight months into his first term, after being elected by the Supreme Court, Bush got lucky. Islamic terrorism stepped in to play the role of archvillain, becoming the steed three presidents would ride for the next two decades, though its effect would wear with time. Despite the FBI’s persistent campaign to incite rudderless young Muslims to play the role of domestic terrorists — even funding plots that were subsequently “thwarted” by the FBI itself — homegrown Islamic terrorism has never lived up to its role as the existential threat the nation’s leaders wished for. That’s why Russia and China are back.

      The response to Islamic terrorism has been so chaotic and mismanaged that, instead of unifying the nation as it once did in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it has had the effect of fragmenting society beyond recognition. Americans now live to hate and cancel other Americans. The most identifiable enemies are people’s own neighbors or fellow citizens with contrasting mindsets.

      After the debacle of Trump’s election in 2016, establishment Democrats seeking a scapegoat focused on Russia as the source of the nation’s deepest fears. Their marketing geniuses imagined what they termed “collusion” between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Republicans preferred to focus on China, though the business wing of the Republican party continues to see China as a burgeoning marketplace for its goods. 

      Now that Russia and China practice the virtues of capitalism, it has become more difficult to frame the rivalry in purely military terms, though the pressure to launch a new arms race is as real as ever. But that has more to do with the fact that the military-industrial complex has become the core of the industrial economy. The new focus is on the notion of cyberthreat. The Cold War is morphing into the Code War.

      Embed from Getty Images

      In April, The Times reported that the Biden administration had “imposed extensive new sanctions on Russia” for the famous SolarWinds hack. It did so on the grounds that the Russian government may have been involved, though, as WhatIs.com reported, it is clearly a question of belief rather than established fact: “Federal investigators and cybersecurity agents believe a Russian espionage operation — most likely Russia‘s Foreign Intelligence Service — is behind the SolarWinds attack.” One of the curious features of the SolarWinds attack is that nobody seems to know if there were any consequences other than the gathering of economic information. “The purpose of the hack remains largely unknown,” WhatIs reports.

      If the complaint about Russian and Chinese industrial spying is little more than rebranded old news in the Russiagate tradition, the most substantial piece of new news is The Washington Post’s scoop about NSO’s software. The fact that it was used to spy on the widest diversity of targets by various governments not averse to exaggerated forms of despotism makes it distinctive and seriously troubling. This isn’t industrial espionage — it’s people espionage.

      What has been the reaction in Israel? While the Israeli government has remained silent, The Washington Post notes that the “NSO Group firmly denies false claims made in your report which many of them are uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability of your sources, as well as the basis of your story.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Uncorroborated theory:

      1. A common way of describing a boatload of unconnected facts that all point toward a person’s or an institution’s accountability
      2. Most of what appears in the news to justify the aggressive foreign policy Americans now believe is a feature of their nation’s identity

      Contextual Note 

      The New York Times described the latest scandal in these terms: “A major Israeli cyber-surveillance company, NSO Group, came under heightened scrutiny Sunday after an international alliance of news outlets reported that governments used its software to target journalists, dissidents and opposition politicians.” A person suspected of a major crime is arrested and eventually charged. In today’s neoliberal world, a company, even in the presence of massive evidence, is merely subjected to “heightened scrutiny.”

      The goal of those using the software is the theft of private information and includes setting up kidnaps and murders, allegedly including the gruesome killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Reuters explains what the US Justice Department believes to be the goal of the Chinese hackers: “The campaign targeted trade secrets in industries including aviation, defense, education, government, health care, biopharmaceutical and maritime industries.” In other words, China’s crime is industrial spying rather than political espionage. It is about property rather than people, or what Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco condemned as an attempt “to steal what other countries make.”

      Historical Note

      It is an observable fact in the functioning of today’s legal systems that protecting private property is far more important than the security of the population. National interest has come to be synonymous with corporate interest. The nations whose corporations historically grew by stealing the resources of the rest of the world after subjecting their populations to colonial rule see no crime as heinous as the attempts of those exploited nations and regions to use modern technology, not to steal, but to learn how to exploit the same processes the advanced economies have built.

      Stealing ideas and processes — or industrial plagiarism — has always been a feature of dynamic economies. Defenders of the letter of the law complain that violating patents kills innovation. On the contrary, the prevention of the transfer of immaterial knowledge encourages monopoly. That not only stifles innovation but creates the conditions for various forms of oppression, including the ability to steal with impunity from weaker rivals. In October 2020, Business Insider reported the allegation against Amazon. An antitrust report by the House Judiciary Committee determined that “Amazon uses third-party seller data to copy the site’s most popular products.”

      The Times offers this historical reminder: “While there is nothing new about digital espionage from Russia and China — and efforts by Washington to block it — the Biden administration has been surprisingly aggressive in calling out both countries and organizing a coordinated response.” Biden seeks to be remembered not as the new FDR, but as the defender of the neoliberal order and the consolidation of the corporate oligarchy as the virtual government overseeing a form of democracy that has been reduced to a set of electoral rituals.

      Capitalists will always seek to steal what others have done. That is called getting an edge on the competition. Sometimes they can do it legally, but often they will do it illegally after taking a maximum number of precautions to avoid being caught. In today’s world of asymmetric economic warfare, the stronger corporations will get away with it, and the stronger nations will find effective ways of punishing those that are trying to catch up.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden targets big tech in executive order aimed at anti-competitive practices

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      Biden administrationBiden targets big tech in executive order aimed at anti-competitive practices‘Capitalism without competition is exploitation’, president said while denouncing era of business monopolies Kari PaulFri 9 Jul 2021 17.07 EDTLast modified on Fri 9 Jul 2021 17.51 EDTJoe Biden has signed an executive order targeting anti-competitive practices across the economy that could have major ramifications for America’s largest tech companies. Friday’s order is the latest of Biden’s actions on anti-trust issues, which have pleased progressives pushing for more action on corporate power – particularly among big tech companies – for years.‘Capitalism without competition is exploitation,’ says Biden as he signs order – liveRead moreMore than a dozen federal agencies will be affected by the order, which includes 72 actions and suggestions meant to “promptly tackle some of the most pressing competition problems across our economy”, the White House said.At a White House signing ceremony, Biden denounced the current era of business monopolies. “Rather than competing for consumers they are consuming their competitors; rather than competing for workers they are finding ways to gain the upper hand on labor,” he said.“Let me be clear: capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation.” The latest actions aimed at big techThe tech measures suggested in the order include restoring net neutrality, re-examining problematic mergers, pushing for rules against excessive corporate surveillance, prevention of unfair termination fees from internet service providers like Verizon and AT&T, and “right to repair” laws.Biden has called for increased scrutiny of mergers by the leading tech companies, “with particular attention to the “acquisition of nascent competitors, serial mergers, the accumulation of data, competition by ‘free’ products, and the effect on user privacy”.This could affect prior mergers that were initially approved but have recently come under renewed scrutiny from the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), including the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook in 2012.The measures targeting big tech acquisitions come weeks after Biden nominated the anti-trust scholar Lina Khan to the FTC, signaling a renewed effort to target big tech firms.It also encourages the FTC to limit farm equipment manufacturers’ ability to restrict the use of independent repair shops or do-it-yourself repairs – such as when tractor companies block farmers from repairing their own tractors.In the order, Biden also encourages the Federal Communications Commission to restore net neutrality, measures that are intended to prevent internet service providers from preferring some content and websites over others, which were rolled back in 2017 under the Trump administration.However, internet freedom advocates say many of the measures that Biden has encouraged the FCC to take cannot move forward until the administration nominates a fifth commissioner, as the four-person board has been deadlocked in recent years.Evan Greer, the director of the digital rights organization Fight for the Future, said the administration needs to quickly nominate a commissioner who “doesn’t have ties to the telecom industry and will stand up to the internet service providers, who supports reinstating net neutrality, and who will expand broadband access for everyone”.“The executive order has a lot of great words, but we need to see some action for those words to mean anything,” she said.Other industries affectedThe order does not only take aim at the tech space – Biden’s efforts to rein in corporate power also extend to his infrastructure plans, as he has called on major companies to pay their “fair share” in taxes to help fund his proposals.Discussing the need to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Americans, Biden said on Wednesday: “I’m not trying to gouge anybody, but, I mean, just get in the game.”The order will ban or limit non-compete agreements to make it easier to change jobs and raise wages in certain industries, allow rule changes that would pave the way for hearing aids to be sold over the counter at drugstores, and ban excessive early termination fees by internet companies.In the airline industry, the administration is requiring companies to provide clear, upfront disclosures about add-on fees and making it easier for customers to get refunds.The order urges easing the process of switching banks by requiring banks to allow customers to take their financial data with them to another company.It includes several provisions that could affect the agricultural industry. It calls on the US Department of Agriculture to consider issuing new rules defining when meat can use “Product of USA” labels. Democratic lawmakers and union leaders cheered the order.Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who chairs the Senate judiciary subcommittee on competition policy, said that Biden’s executive order needed to be buttressed by congressional action.“Competition policy needs new energy and approaches so that we can address America’s monopoly problem,” Klobuchar said. “That means legislation to update our antitrust laws, but it also means reimagining what the federal government can do to promote competition under our current laws.”The Associated Press contributed to this reportTopicsBiden administrationUS domestic policyJoe BidenUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      in World Politics

      “The Golden One,” a Metapolitical Influencer

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      Metapolitics in the discourse of “The Golden One” — or Marcus Follin, online fitness guru, entrepreneur and far-right YouTube personality — is dissimilar to the notion of metapolitics as expressed by Alain de Benoist. De Benoist’s metapolitics was grounded “in an ideological critique of the left and an methodological critique of the right.” It was a way to rethink the ideas and strategies of the true right — the conservative revolutionary right and to bring them into the 20th century.

      For Benoist, any “metapolitical action attempts, beyond political divisions and through a new synthesis, to renew a transversal mode of thought and, ultimately, to study all areas of knowledge in order to propose a coherent worldview.” First and foremost, metapolitics was about the production of theory and distancing oneself from violent activist groups. Secondly, it was about normalizing those ideas in order to fuel political change.

      Guillaume Faye, “The Golden One” and the Metapolitical Warrior

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      The Golden One’s version of metapolitics is not about highbrow intellectual theory or a new theoretical synthesis discussed in books and journals. The Golden One is emblematic of a new type of metapolitics — a metapoltics 2.0 — that is clearly intertwined with the digital infrastructures and digital culture. The Golden One is, in essence, a metapolitical influencer. What is Important to understand is that he does not just reproduce the ideas of others. This would entail that he is a neutral intermediary. By using digital media for metapolitical goals, Follin is producing new ideas, assembling existing concepts and repackaging them while communicating them to a new niche audience.

      Strategic Intimac

      The key to understanding his impact is analyzing his communication in the tradition of social media influencers. Just like most influencers, The Golden One not only produces a clear-cut persona but also mobilizes strategic authenticity and strategic intimacy to bind his audience. The difference is that his personal life is used in the service of metapolitical goals. After his first video in which he discussed what becoming a father meant to him, a whole series followed that touched on subjects like the war on fatherhood or how to raise daughters. Through those seemingly personal videos, The Golden One is promoting the traditional values and pan-European worldview that can be found in the works of Guillaume Faye, albeit in a different form.

      Like all influencers, The Golden One has crafted his own brand. He has created a very specific public persona — a sort of modern-day pastiche of a Nordic Viking-slash-bodybuilder — which he uses for metapolitical and economic goals. He combines fitness, nutrition and training videos with content dedicated to politics, far-right books and activists. He gets paid to give lectures, uses Patreon to get monthly funding (at the moment, he has over 750 patrons who donate each month). Follin also has his own clothing line, Legio Gloria, which he wears in his YouTube videos. He even has his own nutrition line. The Golden One’s success is not only metapolitical — it is also a small business venture.

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      The Golden One’s brand finances his metapolitics and vice versa. Through his online presence and his influencer technics, he manages to inspire far-right activists and youth around the world. It is in this uptake that we can assess the meaning of his work. One of those viewers and fans is the “Son of Europe.” The Son of Europe is a member of the far-right Flemish identitarian movement Schild & Vrienden. In a YouTube video titled “How I got red pilled” (the Son of Europe published the video in 2018 but has deactivated his account after Schild & Vrienden was exposed in a documentary as an extreme right, racist and anti-Semitic movement), he explained that finding The Golden One was a “pivotal moment” in his red-pilling process. He not only “started watching, binge watching actually, the Golden One’s videos,” but also started to exercise more and “go the gym more,” “doing research and also started reading more.” It is thus through the self-help, fitness and, eventually, the purely political content offered by The Golden One that the Son of Europe crafted his identity, set up an Instagram account and became politically active in the Flemish identitarian movement.

      Community Challenge

      The Golden One’s “Wild Hunt Challenge” would prove to be very influential in shaping the Son of Europe. It was as a result of this challenge “aimed at reinforcing positive behaviors in young men” that the Son of Europe created his Instagram account. The Golden One challenged young men to train at least five days a week, stop watching porn or at least masturbating to porn because he wanted them to be “aggressive and disciplined.” This is non-negotiable if you want to be part of his “legionnaires.” He also urged his followers to read an article every day and to post “a glorious picture of yourself … in the most epic place you know” and “upload it to Instagram with the tag #legiogloria.”

      It was through these posts, said the Son of Europe, that a community was born. This community not only created transnational ties among far-right activists. It also functioned as a learning environment. The Sone of Europe claims in his video that it was in this Legio Gloria that he learned everything about “the domination of cultural Marxism” and “the domination of certain groups in the banking world.” He even concludes by saying that this “formed my ideology as it is up to today.” Even more, he took up the role of a “metapolitical warrior” and started posting videos and pictures on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in the genre of The Golden One.

      The Golden One — as an influencer or micro-celebrity within the far-right niche — reentextualizes Faye’s discourse and brings it to a whole new audience. This new type of metapolitics in the digital age is not only about the circulation of ideas; it is also about digital literacy and digital culture. In order to stay integrated in this economy of virality and generate uptake, metapolitical influencers need to be media-literate. They need to develop specific strategies and make full use of the opportunities and algorithms offered by the different media to build an audience or a community. Not only is the knowledge of algorithmic imagination crucial to generating metapolitical impact in this digital ecology, but understanding and adjusting to the culture of the platform is at least as important.

      Guillaume Faye, “The Golden One” and the Metapolitical Legion

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      Metapolitics 2.0 is deeply weaved into the new media system. The impact and influence of The Golden One, and his role in the distribution of far-right ideology, cannot be reduced to his content alone. We have to understand it in relation to his online persona and also to the digital and algorithmic environments in which he uses his voice. Not only is the management of visibility but also avoiding non-visibility, as Taina Bucher stresses, a constant worry for all actors in this media system. Making yourself visible, drawing attention is of crucial importance for all ideological projects.

      The Golden One, in his long social media career, has proven a master at this game. On top of that, he was able to stay fully integrated into all major digital platforms — YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook — for almost a decade. Follin used all that those platforms have to offer and adopted classic influencer techniques to grow an audience, keep that audience hooked and build a community around him.

      The key to any contemporary metapolitical project is being and staying integrated with the culture of the platform and, more specifically, adjusting to its community rules. It is their integration in this new media ecology that allows actors to become so influential. Since the end of 2020, The Golden One has evidently struggled to stay integrated. His personal Instagram and Facebook accounts have been deleted. He is now using his existing mainstream accounts to make sure that his audience can move along to new platforms like GAB and Telegram.

      In ab attempt to keep himself on YouTube, he has announced to stop posting political videos on the platform. This desperate attempt to reinstate his Instagram and to maintain his YouTube presence shows us just how important mainstream digital media are for this metapolitical project.

      *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      in US Politics

      Is Biden’s appointment of a pioneering young lawyer bad news for big tech? | John Naughton

      by

      A flashback: it’s Wednesday 29 July 2020. I’m sitting glued to the US TV network C-Span, which is relaying – live – a hearing of the House of Representatives subcommittee on antitrust, commercial and administrative law. The hearing is being held following the publication of a sprawling report of a year-long investigation into the market dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.Arrayed on big screens before the members of the subcommittee are the four bosses of the aforementioned tech giants: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, then midway through his Star Trek makeover; Tim Cook of Apple, looking like the clean-living lad who never understood the locker-room jokes; Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, wearing his trademark glued-on hairdo; and the Google boss, Sundar Pichai, every inch the scholarship boy who can’t understand why he’s been arrested by the Feds. And on the vast mahogany bench towering above these screened moguls sits David Cicilline, subcommittee chairman and the politician who has overseen the investigation.To be honest, I was watching out of duty and with low expectations. All the previous congressional interrogations of Zuckerberg and co had alternated between political grandstanding and farce. I expected much the same from this encounter. And then I noticed a young woman wearing a black mask standing behind Cicilline. She looked vaguely familiar, but it took me a few moments before I twigged that she was Lina Khan. At which point I sat up and started taking notes.I had been following her for years, ever since a paper she had published as a graduate student in the Yale Law Journal in January 2017. The title of the paper – Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox – signalled that there was something radical coming up, because since the mid-1970s US antitrust philosophy had been shaped by a landmark book by another lawyer, Robert Bork. Its title was The Antitrust Paradox and it argued that the prime focus of action against monopolies should not be corporate power, per se, but consumer harm as measured by unreasonably high prices. And since many of the products and services offered by the tech giants were “free” to their users they could hardly be accused of this; their wielding of monopoly power should not therefore be penalised by the state, for doing so would be tantamount to “penalising excellence”. Thus was shaped the legal doctrine that allowed a small number of tech companies to acquire immense power without being unduly troubled by legislators.This was the doctrine that Khan set out to demolish in her paper. She argued that Amazon was a dangerous monopoly that charged unsustainably low prices because the company knew that its shareholders would allow it to lose money for longer than its competitors. And it was also able to operate a “marketplace” that competed with the businesses that relied on it to reach customers, while amassing data on them that further entrenched its advantages. In other words, it wielded significant power for which there was no real redress.Khan’s paper lit a fuse that’s been fizzing ever since. It informed the Cicilline investigation and the subsequent report. And it’s what underpinned four of the five new bills that were unveiled last week, each one co-sponsored by Republican as well as Democratic politicians and each one targeted at monopolistic abuses identified in the report. The “Cicilline Salvo” is how the incomparable tech analyst Ben Thompson summarises them. The American innovation and choice online bill forbids platforms from giving advantages to their own products and services on marketplaces that they operate. The platform competition and opportunity bill outlaws pre-emptive acquisitions by tech giants of startups that might threaten their dominance (such as Facebook acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp, for instance). The ending platform monopolies bill bans platforms from owning any product or service that rests on top of its platform and competes with third parties in any way. And the augmenting compatibility and competition by enabling service switching bill requires tech platforms to make it easy for users to switch platforms (and take their data and social graph with them); in other words, it imposes on platforms what many jurisdictions now enforce on mobile phone operators, energy companies and other businesses.Of course, there’s many a slip ’twixt drafting and the statute book, but these are very significant pieces of legislation that go some way towards bringing tech companies under democratic control. And, to cap it all, last week also saw the announcement that Khan was to become chair of the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that, along with the US Department of Justice, has the legal muscle to enforce compliance with whatever these new laws stipulate.Which leaves us with two reflections. One is, as David Runciman pointed out in The Confidence Trap, his landmark study of the recent history of democracy, that while democracies can take a long time to awaken from their slumbers, once aroused they can be very effective. The other is a confirmation of the power of ideas, even those of a young graduate student, to change history.What I’ve been readingSituation vacant On Algorithmic Communism is a long, thoughtful review by Ian Lorrie in the LA Review of Books of Nick Srnicek’s and Alex Williams’s book, Inventing the Future, about a world without work.What’s in a phrase?There Is Nothing so Deep as the Gleaming Surface of the Aphorism is a nice – aphoristic – essay by Noreen Masud.Net costsThe Cost of Cloud: A Trillion-Dollar Paradox is a perceptive piece by Sarah Wang and Martin Casado on the expensive technology on which our networked world now depends. More