Trending toward Idiocracy

In an interview/podcast with Ben Weingarten in the Federalist, Glenn Reynolds explains some of the points he made in his new book, Social Media Upheaval.

Big tech is evil.

...People always ask me that. “Do you miss Twitter?” “No!” And people are sometimes trying to pressure me to go back to Twitter, and I can happily tell them, “My account’s cancelled. All my followers are gone. You wouldn’t even know if I did tweet.” I’m calmer. I’m happier. My life is better in every way. And I thought that I would miss out on a lot of breaking news and stuff, but it turns out not really very much. In fact, what you really see on Twitter is just the same old crap being beaten to death day after day.

...As Jaron Lanier points out in his book on social media, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, the easiest emotions for the algorithms to amplify are the negative emotions – so, fear, anger, and sadness. Weirdly, research shows that a lot of people on social media tend to be more scared, angrier, and sadder. Go figure.

In the book, I come out primarily for the enforcement of antitrust laws, and one of the things antitrust laws forbid, besides just monopoly, is collusion. And what we’ve seen pretty clearly is collusion on the part of the Big Tech companies to keep out competitors.

...The second thing is bigness. These companies are effectively monopolies.

...But companies like Google and Facebook, etc., actually basically have their feet on the neck of the political communications in the country, and they can take a story and make it go away, or they can advance it. And again, we had another case recently where they admit that Google is fiddling with their searches of Trump to make him look bad, just because they can. So that is a kind of political power that is something previous eras of monopolists didn’t have, and I think that it’s entirely consistent with libertarian principles to break up that kind of source of unaccountable power.

...The bad news for the tech companies is that — I guess with the social acumen you would expect from a bunch of geeks — they have managed to make everybody hate them. They’re hated on the left. They’re hated on the right. It’s really actually astounding because their personnel lean very far left, so you would think they would naturally cultivate allies on the left to protect them from attacks on [the right]. No. They’ve blown it completely. The left hates them too. And there’s just a huge amount of common ground. So I think that they’re going to have to spend a lot of money on lawyers and lobbyists in D.C., and that may not be enough.

...But I think they definitely have decided to put a thumb on the scale this time. They did a little bit in a few cases in 2016, but they’re just all in for 2020. And I think that’s super risky for them for two reasons: One is, they might fail. And in fact, I think they’re likely to fail because while they have power, they have less power than they think they do. Like Robby Mook, they think their data analytics tells them more than it really does. You think the trust-busting is bad, but if they lose to Trump after trying to kill him – you know the old saying, “If you strike the king you must kill him” — Trump remembers, and he’s not gonna let bygones be bygones.

But the second thing is, if they succeed, they become like the Praetorian guard of American politics. Now whoever wins has got to control them. And I promise you that if any Democrat, really, wins, they are going to make sure those companies are thoroughly under their control and under their thumbs in ways that the companies will probably turn out not to like very much.

...There was a wonderful woman who’s a neuroscientist who decided to test herself by reading some of the long books by Thomas Mann and people like that whom she had liked, and she said she can’t do it. Her attention span is too short. You start reaching for your phone, or whatever.

Read more here.