Zucker's Cyberia: Labyrinth of Lies + Hate

20 February 2017

Zucker's Cyberia: Labyrinth of Lies + Hate

Niall Ferguson

February 19 2017, 12:01am, The Sunday Times

The lying, hating hi‑tech webs of Zuck and Trump are the new superpowers

Extracts from The Times UK [over 100 comments published with article]

*Please see blogger's note after reading extracts

"Laugh out loud if you dare. Globalisation is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. How on earth do we make sense of all this? In pursuit of answers, many bewildered commentators resort to crude historical analogies. To some, Donald Trump is Hitler, about to proclaim an American dictatorship. To others, he is Richard Nixon, on the verge of being impeached."

You cannot understand the world today without understanding how it has changed as a result of information technology. This has enormously empowered networks of all kinds over traditional power structures.

Networks were the key to what happened in politics last year.
Above all, there was the grassroots network of support that Trump built using the power of Facebook, Twitter and the Breitbart news website.

It was this that defeated the “global special interests” that — according to the final ad of campaign chief executive Steve Bannon — stood behind the “failed and corrupt political establishment” personified by Trump’s opponent. Note here how one network attacks another.
It all goes to show networks are transforming not only the economy — through viral advertising, targeted marketing and “sharing” of cars and apartments — but also the public sphere and democracy itself. Yes, it’s awesome: we’re all connected. But the notion that taking the whole world online would create a utopia of “netizens”, all equal in cyberspace, was always a fantasy.

On Thursday Facebook’s co-founder, chairman and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, posted a long defence of that ideal of an interconnected “global community”, arguing that his company’s role should be to promote “meaningful” local communities, to enhance “safety” (by monitoring content with artificial intelligence), to promote diversity of ideas, and to foster civic engagement — even at the global level. “As the largest global community,” Zuckerberg wrote, “Facebook can explore examples of how community governance might work at scale.”
The example he cited was last month’s anti-Trump Women’s March.
The reality is that the global network has become a dangerously unstable structure. Far from promoting equality, it does the opposite, by allowing hyper-connected “superhubs” to emerge. Surprise, surprise, from Trump to PewDiePie, these turn out to be rather the reverse of saintly role models.

Far from spreading truth and love, the network excels at disseminating lies and hatred, because those are the things we nasty, fallen human beings like to click on.
Zuckerberg’s letter has been “liked” more than 66,000 times on Facebook and 2,400 times on Twitter.

The following tweet was liked by twice as many people on Facebook and 35 times as many on Twitter: “Stock market hits new high with longest winning streak in decades. Great level of confidence and optimism — even before tax plan rollout!”
That tweet came from Trump.

If, 20 years from now, someone asks you what finally crashed the global network, you’ll want to mention the @realDonaldTrump virus.

But remember: the flawed design of the network made the outage inevitable. And for that, Chairman “Zuck” is much more to blame.

Niall Ferguson’s new book, The Square and the Tower: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Networks, will be published in the autumn by Penguin

Blogger's Note:
None of the images used in this post appeared in Niall Ferguson's original article.

Other news sources:

MesaZona > Table of Contents : Here's The Menu. Enjoy

20 February 2017

Zucker's Cyberia: Labyrinth of Lies + Hate

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