At a certain level, formerly functioning societies seem to be growing unnecessarily complicated. Yet, in a more basic sense, it's all coming together:
Yesterday, as I was heading home after our live Clubland Q&A, it was all breaking news about the YouTube shooter. As usual in the first moments after such an attack, it's all tediously speculative - except for the apparent eyewitness report that the gunman was, in fact, a gunwoman. That, on the other hand, sent the breaking-news chappies boring down yet another dreary alley - that it was supposedly a YouTube employee upset with an ex-boyfriend. I gave up and listened to music all the way back.
In fact, the shooter was subsequently revealed to be Nasim Aghdam. What kind of name is that for a psychologically disturbed white-loner NRA gun-nut? Well, Miss Aghdam turns out to be a Persian vegan who came to the US as a refugee in 1996. She made the first vegan Farsi music video. Is that as big a breakthrough as it sounds? Well, if you haven't already seen it, you'll never know: her entire social-media presence has been vaporized, in part because a mass shooter who's female, vegan, immigrant, refugee, Iranian and Ba'hai is not helpful to the narrative - which is why CNN, MSNBC and the rest have done to this news story what YouTube did to her vegan video.
And yet the San Bruno shooting is oddly emblematic. As Miss Aghdam discovered, Persian vegan vids weren't quite the cash cow (if vegan readers will forgive the expression) that she hoped they would be. Further down her now vanished home page, she complained that she'd had 300,000 hits and YouTube had paid her precisely ten cents:
They then de-monetized her videos so that even that thin dime was denied her. So she went over to YouTube and shot up the joint.
As I've said before, YouTube is a racket: industrial copyright theft on a planet-wide scale. They get Gladys Scroggins of 27b Elm Street to do most of the active thievery - posting, say, her favorite Michael Jackson video - and then they become one of the biggest corporate behemoths in history by selling advertising off her theft, and tossing the occasional dime Gladys' way. If you raise an objection to anything they're doing, you get 47 emails from fellows with different first names - "Bob", "Dave", "Nigel", "Kelli-Su", "Miguel", "Rajiv", "LaShon'dra", "Bud" - all reciting the exact same boilerplate screw-you response.
It was inevitable that some users would eventually weary of this approach to customer relations and decide to take matters into their own hands. I would not, however, have bet on it being an Iranian vegan. A couple of weeks back, I was guest-hosting "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and introduced an interview Tucker had conducted with Dennis Prager, a man for whom I have nothing but the greatest respect: He is blessed with magnificent moral clarity, and an unerring grasp of what's really at stake in the flotsam and jetsam of the daily news churn. Like many of us, Dennis is concerned at the leftward tilt of Big Tech: Facebook and Google/YouTube are bigger and more powerful than many sovereign nations, and in the last decade their malign duopoly has shrunk the Internet from a vast jostling cacophony into a blander, tightly formatted landscape run by a cartel of devious algorithms.
You don't even have to be that "right-wing". Mandy O'Brien ran a popular "body language channel on YouTube, but made the mistake of analyzing St David of Hogg's body language - and now YouTube has disappeared her channel, and the only body language you can spot over there is rigor mortis.
What to do about it? Some (including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg) favor government regulation - which would turn them into Ma Bell and give them a hammerlock on the 21st century as Bell had for almost the entirety of the 20th. Others prefer an anti-trust break-up: If Standard Oil was too big in 1911, both Facebook (as a news outlet) and Google/YouTube (as a content promoter) are far bigger today - and, unlike Esso, there are no Shells, Texacos, BPs or Totals on the horizon.
However, I'm slightly less clear on the logic of suing YouTube in order to get them to give your content more prominence than they wish to. That's like me suing Barnes & Noble because I'm on the bottom shelf in the back room rather than in the front window. So, at the end of the Tucker/Dennis segment, I remarked en passant:
Hmm. I hope Dennis has a good lawyer - 'cause that's actually quite a subtle needle his legal team will need to thread there...
It is and they didn't. Last week Judge Lucy Koh dismissed the Prager suit in an order that was noticeably unimpressed by his legal team's theory of the case. As Nasim Aghdam realized, YouTube is operating a class system: You check the "monetization" box, but then somebody complains about you and you're "de-monetized", which kinda leaves a taint of festering resentment, like all that blue-check bollocks at Twitter. Why, it's almost like being made to sit at the back of the cyber-bus or use a separate de-monetized drinking fountain...
Don't like it? Well, you can go to a rock-ribbed conservative like, say, Senator Mike Lee of Utah. But Google/YouTube recently moved into his state and - surprise! - he now seems disinclined to rock that particular boat. Tucker Carlson interviewed him, and some edgy Internet types lifted the interview and posted it to YouTube, billing Senator Lee as "Google's Number One bootlicker"- and then complained that Google/YouTube had "shadow banned" them so they'd only just realized that Google/YouTube were preventing them cleaning up with Google/YouTube ad revenue by posting somebody else's content on Google/YouTube in order to trash Google/YouTube. That right there is the Internet in a nutshell.
Presumably someone someday will lay a motion before an American judge arguing the case rather better than the slapdash Prager brief did. But YouTube will now be able to respond that they don't just discriminate against conservatives, they discriminate against all sorts of people, including Iranian vegan immigrants - and they have the bullet-holes to prove it.
The San Bruno attack also underlines a point I've been making for over a decade, ever since my troubles with Canada's "human rights" commissions: "Hate speech" doesn't lead to violence so much as restraints on so-called "hate speech" do - because, when you tell someone you can't say that, there's nothing left for him to do but open fire or plant his bomb. Restricting speech - or even being perceived to be restricting speech - incentivizes violence as the only alternative. As you'll notice in YouTube comments, I'm often derided as a pansy fag loser by the likes of ShitlordWarrior473 for sitting around talking about immigration policy as opposed to getting out in the street and taking direct action. In a culture ever more inimical to freedom of expression, there'll be more of that: The less you're permitted to say, the more violence there will be.
Google/YouTube and Facebook do not, of course, make laws, but their algorithms have more real-world impact than most legislation - and, having started out as more or less even-handed free-for-alls, they somehow thought it was a great idea to give the impression that they're increasingly happy to assist the likes of Angela Merkel and Theresa May as arbiters of approved public discourse. Facebook, for example, recently adjusted its algorithm, and by that mere tweak deprived Breitbart of 90 per cent of its ad revenue. That's their right, but it may not have been a prudent idea to reveal how easily they can do that to you.
What happened yesterday is a remarkable convergence of the spirits of the age: mass shootings, immigration, the Big Tech thought-police, the long reach of the Iranian Revolution, the refugee racket, animal rights, vegan music videos... It was the latest mismatched meeting between east and west in the age of the Great Migrations: Nasim Aghdam died two days before her 39th birthday, still living (according to news reports) with either her parents or her grandmother. She came to America at the age of seventeen, and spent two decades in what appears to be a sad and confused search to find something to give her life meaning. But in a cruder sense the horror in San Bruno was also a sudden meeting of two worlds hitherto assumed to be hermetically sealed from each other: the cool, dispassionate, dehumanized, algorithmic hum of High Tech - and the raw, primal, murderous rage breaking through from those on the receiving end.
~Mark will be back on TV tomorrow evening, Thursday, with Tucker Carlson, live across America at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific - with a rerun at midnight Eastern. We hope you'll tune in! If you prefer Steyn in non-visual form, on Friday evening we'll be launching our latest Tale for Our Time - one of our bonus features for Mark Steyn Club members. So, if you've a friend who's into classic fiction, you might like to sign him or her up for a Steyn Club Gift Membership - because this thirteenth of our nightly audio adventures is not to be missed!
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Maybe it's me but....there seem to be enough people\groups out there banned by YouTube that they could get together and form a UsTube or NotThemTube. Buy their own servers and post their own content. People who do porn videos did it\do it. They aren't on YouTube and yet seem to be thriving. Heck maybe they could get Amazon to do it? JB would probably love to try and get some of YouTube\Googles market away from them.
Seems to me that all these peopl, Prager included just want to whine and complain rather then do anything about it.
How did we get here? My first "real boss" told me "The first business of any business is to stay in business".
That's what the Big Techs are doing, "carpus diem", they've seized the environment in which they were created. They will evolve when their environment makes them "change" to "stay in business"
Our "modern" culture has dehumanized the "core" of being human, Being a Mother, respect for human life is now an option. I got a pretty good idea how we got here, Mark is helping with that, he's also is warning us where we end up if we don't try to change the projection of what's going on.
I just searched the meaning of "socialism" and found the first entry to be a softened-up definition from our trusty friends at Google, without citation. Google is the authority. It says: "a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole." It sounds like a mission statement at Google. It both excuses their expropriation of content and establishes social media as potential and kinetic political energy. I read "community" like "people" in the People's Republic of China - in name only. Companies like this intend to operate as an extension of the state, beyond public accountability.
Increasingly, he who controls the search controls the present, past, and future.
You really hit the nail on the head with:
'but their algorithms have more real-world impact than most legislation'
and
'and spent two decades in what appears to be a sad and confused search to find something to give her life meaning.'
I once watched Alex Jones talking with Joe Rogan where he perfectly described google as 'a collective consciousness.' We're all running around with our phones attached to our faces providing little inputs, little queries, and passing messages amongst eachother. And we get little outputs and then perform actions based on that information we got out of the collective. Alex described how google has gone beyond merely answering questions that people ask and are now providing the "correct" answers in anticipation of what "actions" are desirable. Makes you think. Facebook is doing similar things with their algos and they were caught not very long ago manipulating people's feeds and then evaluating their emotional state before and after. It's all about changing behaviour. But I'm starting to realize that their main goal is not necessarily to instil the "right" behaviour or "good" behaviour, but to suppress all behaviour. Hence the continual struggle we all have going on to find something meaningful in our life other than reading and commenting the news... as I'm doing right now.
Your "little input" here was pretty cool to read though, Robert, so that can't be nothing, can it? Sharing honest thoughts with one another in a friendly environment such as this one is has certainly improved the quality of my life. Life is short, and we only get one. Our time is limited on earth, mine possibly more than yours, so if we're having fun doing something, enjoying a few laughs and gathering up a few slivers of wisdom from others along the way as we read others' insights then I think, well, why not enjoy it while it lasts? Nothing lasts forever. As long as we understand and accept this, we'll be good.
Maybe what drives people to the brink is too much stock placed on searching for meaningfulness in life. The pressure to find it maybe is too much to bear. Maybe it's there when you stop looking for it and trying to analyze everything. Just learning to enjoy the experiences along the way and being able to process them and then share them. Maybe that's all any one should expect out of life. Otherwise, we set up these unrealistic expectations and get disappointed as is a natural reaction, I admit. It's more about the recovery from disappointments and life's heartbreaks that strenghthen us. We can always try again. It's sad that this young woman had no other recourse than to snuff it all out when maybe she might've hit the pause button and asked if there was another solution. I don't know. Just my take.
This is true.. in my own life, I live totally for my kids now. I'm their rock of Gibraltar. No, no delusions of grandeur here. I think you are absolutely right. The generations that followed mine have had this "save the world" attitude (compulsion?) instilled in them such that they are not happy unless they are enforcing their superior will or higher morality on someone else. That's their search for meaning and to me it's sad because I see alot of them running around saving the world having made the decision NOT to have kids.
I can relate to that. Boy, out of four children, I'm thankful that I have the two adorable grandchildren I have. They're definitely our number one travel destination. It's more fun watching them grow up than having a houseful of our own kids to think about and worring about how they're lives will turn out. Always hearing now about how we probably did everything all wrong. I don't care anymore. I think we did our best. It's the difference between sheer joy (the grandchildren) and caretaking and role modeling 24/7 (the children). Still a little of that but I can see the wee ones light up when they see us. They don't expect anything from us just the extra attention. It's so great.
I don't understand how it is possible more conservative-friendly media companies do not exist. The elections continue to prove at least half of American is conservative. Yet somehow this market continues to be under-served.
Because the monopolies won't let them get financing or even space? Dirty tricks? There are many. Starting to get interested in brick and mortar stores and real books again, not virtual space.
The problem is that a social network is only valuable if almost everyone is on it. Facebook put a lot of time, effort and passion into getting everyone on. Oddly enough I think the best thing they did was bring overwhelming technical competence to the table. All the other social networks had glitches and service outages and failures; Facebook has truly been the social utility that's always there for us. That's quite a feat and they deserve a lot of credit for it.
Facebook only started overt bias when they already had the critical mass they needed. Because of this it will be very expensive in time, effort and technical talent to provide a viable alternative, since the whole world has to know about it, and then choose it. Now we realize a neutral or right leaning social network is needed, but making it well enough known to make a difference is hard. But in the end I think the stakes are too high for it not to happen. As you said, at least half the US population is poorly served by what they have and ripe for change.
I definitely have a lot more faith in that process than I do in the idea of government being able to do anything positive or meaningful. If you consider that government is left-leaning by its very nature, you can see the problem with trusting them to regulate anything having to do with speech. I predict that if we have regulation Facebook and other sites will become far more left leaning than ever, and we will be nostalgic for the days when it was only Mark Zuckerberg and the Google guys we had to fear.
(I am a software developer who tried to produce an alternative social network in the early 2000s. It vanished without a trace, so I am aware of many of the technical and social problems involved.)
Say what you will about John D. Rockefeller, Jim Hill, the early Vandetbilts, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, J.P Morgan and all the other "robber barons "; one thing is true - All they wanted was to make money. The current cohort of dot.com, media and internet "barons" give the impression that they want to control your very soul. The guys who got rich during post Civil War "The Gilded Age" were ruthless and cunning. The Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, YouTube etc crowd are just creepy.
Yes, very weird. And all from the most privileged upbringings, so no excuses that they had a tough life. Seems counter-intuitive that an easy life would make people mean and stingy, instead of relaxed and generous.
Excellent, sometimes funny, sometimes not, but excellent observation nonetheless. Quick solution: stop watching MSM. It'll do wonders for your psyche.
If Standard Oil was too big in 1911, both Facebook (as a news outlet) and Google/YouTube (as a content promoter) are far bigger today - and, unlike Esso, there are no Shells, Texacos, BPs or Totals on the horizon.
That's a very big "if"....whenever I check historical oil prices, it appears that they started high in the 1860s, dropped to historic lows before 1890 (when the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed), and remained at historic lows until well after 1911 (when Standard Oil was broken up). The notion that these dirty, evil monopolists were going to charge sky-high rates if the government didn't step in was a matter of pure theory, as far as I can tell--and "trust-busting" looks a lot more like pure populist resentment of "bigness" than a response to something that was actually hurting consumers.
There are a lot more options for "news providers" now than there were a few decades ago...you can still read AP reports directly on Yahoo, EarthLink, or many other sites, without touching Facebook and without paying a penny for them, or subscribe to any number of news websites. Facebook and Google beat out a lot of competitors for their current positions...and there is, if anything, less justification for using the Government to stop them from "blocking competition." Internet services don't rely on scarce land resources in the way that railroads or oil rigs do--whoever wants to compete, can try. .
It's morally wrong to use the government to punish Google or Facebook because you don't like their "slant" any more than I do (and that's what all these calls for "breakup" are about). It's also potentially very foolish. Mr. Trump is as good as we could hope for in a President right now (not the same as "the best imaginable"); Congressional Republicans are often disappointing but still better than the alternative; rightly or wrongly, politicians are judged on how the economy is doing when they are in office; and successfully attacking any large sector of the U.S. economy isn't good for the party in power.
Monopolies do charge more. Anti-trust law is well founded.
A monopoly can be bad, but not necessarily because the practices of arriving at it were bad.
If phone companies were shutting off service based on technicians listening to conversations and deciding which ones should be off-limits, that would be unacceptable due to privacy laws. Twitter and YouTube do just that. If the phone company were nixing conversations happening on speaker-phones - without the expectation of privacy - would that be any more acceptable? Why not? Because the phone system is a utility? Is the Internet a utility?
These are private companies, who should be free to practice capitalism, right? Not so, not in the long term. As Mark says, Facebook is begging to be regulated. Why? To raise barriers to entry and stave off competition. The future will be stocked with business-government relationships like never before. These will be cartels. They will be subsidized by the codifying of unfair business practices backed with the muscle of the most monopolistic of entities on Earth: government.
It isn't about punishing companies for having the wrong slant. The concern is that companies are punishing individuals for having the wrong slant. Silicon Valley companies aid China in its repressive tactics. Silicon Valley companies are forming alliances with hegemonic governments in the West, too.
Just some non-vegan, high-protein food for thought.
Interesting. I was at the wreckers today. Was talking to Rod about 17 yo sons and cars and trouble and stuff. My son going to court for minor traffic matters next week. He told me his son was taken off the road by the local magistrates court. Then a few days later Roads and Maratime Services NSW government agency) sent him a letter overriding the court and took him off the road for a further two months!
Big Tech is racing to see who will rule "the cloud". The Dept of Defense is going to contract with one of the Big Tech's to help put their entire "soul" on a cloud. HUH! "You're safe with us", it's like giving the key to your front door with a neighbor to look after your home when you go on vacation. " They look like nice people". Shame me once, shame on you, Shame me twice, shame on ME. Can you spell Snowden, or PRIVATE He/She who got a pardon for Treason from President Communist. Will the last American to leave the Home of the Free and the Brave turn the lights off.
Monopolies do charge more. Anti-trust law is well founded.
I haven't yet seen an example, except when the Government ran the monopoly itself, or helped to keep the monopoly in place, e.g., by requiring licenses and denying them to competitors. (This is one reason I oppose state lotteries...the states can only guarantee they'll make money if they punish other people for trying to compete with them.)
The closest thing I have seen fits the example I gave with petroleum. Brand new products that are going to be popular start out as very expensive rich men's toys, and of course only a few people are making them at first...but prices plunge, even in the complete absence of antitrust law. Antitrust law is vague and not well founded--it gives the government way too much discretion to bring cases against anyone who's too successful. .
If phone companies were shutting off service based on technicians listening to conversations and deciding which ones should be off-limits, that would be unacceptable due to privacy laws. Twitter and YouTube do just that.
Twitter and YouTube conversations are very, very "public"....you can't say you have an expectation of privacy in a message you put out there for all the world to see. Listening to a private conversation, if the person having it has an expectation of privacy, is a different story. The tort of "Invasion of Privacy" is an old one, and the remedy is to sue for damages according to the harm the person did. It has nothing whatever to do with antitrust law, or with breaking up companies because we don't like their ideological bent.
In terms of petroleum, I see a much higher price at the only gas station when I drive on a long stretch of empty road, charging probably a dollar more a gallon to unsuspecting drivers, who don't know the distance to the next gas station. It has a monopoly in that locale, because you're almost out of gas. All the gas stations ten miles up the road charge much less. The De Beers diamond company is an example of a monopoly. It stored vast quantities of diamonds off-market in warehouses, causing diamond prices go through the roof. If monopolistic behavior didn't increase price, competition wouldn't reduce it.
Twitter and YouTube conversations being very public is a matter of degree in difference from the example of a speaker-phone. The principle is the same. I am not relating censorship of speech by Twitter and YouTube to Anti-trust law. I am saying Anti-trust law being in place is serving a good, largely unseen purpose. We are not seeing as much abuse by monopoly because they're not allowed. Other government prohibition and regulation of all sorts of anti-competitive practices is serving the same purpose and keeping capitalism competitive and humming. Our government over-regulates, but that's not to say there aren't excellent regulations in place that protect consumers and businesses. There are. In an example of where this was not occurring, the financial industry went through a rapid series of mega-mergers during the last term of the Clinton administration. It was anti-competitive and contributed to the too-big-to-fail financial crisis of 2008. That was the absence of prudent government, and, with Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin's later cash-in of over $100 million from Citibank, it looked like a quid pro quo.
The distinction between a strict monopoly and a quasi-monopoly is somewhat academic. The relevant reality is that the government intertwinement with business is mutually beneficial, to the great expense of ordinary, free people, and is leading to a hold on a big government-big business coalition of power that will be difficult to undo.
It has a monopoly in that locale, because you're almost out of gas....
Or, to put it another way, demand is higher, because you're almost out of gas. (If everyone was really being suckered by the higher rate, easiest thing is for the cheaper station down the road to put up a billboard, advertising their price and saying how far away they are....Raceway stations did that all the time when I lived in Alabama, and there was no need to get the public prosecutor involved.) Hot dog vendors in the park charge a lot more than supermarkets, but that's not because they're doing something evil that the government needs to stop...you're paying for the convenience of getting it right there, right then.
Twitter and YouTube conversations being very public is a matter of degree in difference from the example of a speaker-phone.
Oh, good heavens, no. Twitter and YouTube conversations are more like hanging your messages on hand-painted signs off of overpasses, where everyone who uses the highway can read "I luv u Melissa come home!" if he looks up from the road. That speakerphone would have to be a loudspeaker phone, out in the park, to be so public. Someone who peeps in your window while you shower is invading your privacy; but if you go streaking on a public sidewalk, anyone can see the goods on display and you can't claim invasion of privacy.
The relevant reality is that the government intertwinement with business is mutually beneficial, to the great expense of ordinary, free people....
I agree with that completely, which is part of the reason I oppose antitrust law. Look at the text of the Sherman Antitrust Act...forbidding contracts "in restraint of trade" and making it a crime to "attempt to monopolize...any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations..." That's the kind of law that's easy to twist in favor of cronies and against their competitors...or in favor of ideological allies and against ideological enemies.
It's like the worst of the vague criminal statutes Mark complains about ("mail fraud" is, sadly, vague and broadly read, and open to abuse as well, even before you couple it with RICO). You can always claim that successful competition "restrains trade" or is an "attempt to monopolize." That's particularly true with something like social media...where the whole point is to pick a platform that all your friends (and the people you want to follow) are using. If you try to succeed at that, you're trying to "monopolize" by definition, but there's nothing immoral or harmful about it.
Oh, good heavens, yes. I can see that the ultra-simplistic, stripped-to-the-bones examples I'm using, for the sake of clarity, are being taken as literal things I'm arguing for, so this is moving backwards.
This is a longer discussion that this space permits, but it is an interesting topic that, tangentially, we'll see revived a bit as Trump proceeds.
A couple of thoughts after reading. The whole thing has a surrealness. Breathless story on the news, a cartoon-like person, a photo here a photo there that suggests a lot, the supposed motive requires accepting again a premise that should be sternly questioned, that people just flipout and try to 'off' random people they don't know. No, they don't. Met surviviors of the Rwandan genocide, who endured far more, yet don't have such episodes as supposedly being spawned by the well-fed, low-crime stress of U.S. life. Then, pouf! all gone. One is suddenly considered rude to bring it up, "Er, what's the rest of the story?" Fine, if they are going to be like that, build us up for the big roadtrip ride only to be tossed out to the curb at the first stoplight, then we are left to either ignore the whole thing or go look up her papa's curious resume.
Surprised no one has talked about this, the peculiarity of online advertising. Have to say that for the eyes, this site is a relaxing pleasure to visit. Not a single grotesque photo of fruits or vegetables applied to odd bodily places on unnaturally decrepit persons to distract from the text. In contrast, when visiting the 'Left' sites, the ads are actually ads for furniture, cruises, foods, nice clothing, yachts, actual consumer goods and services. Surprised no website owners aren't demanding why is that? Transparancy!
Oh, sorry all, but last thought. Kwashiorkor malnutrition is caused by a protein-calorie deficiency. Highlight the 'protein' part of the deficiency. In poor countries, it's usually from a high-carbohydrate diet that lacks the animal proteins of eggs, milk and meat. In poor families, they don't have and can't afford to buy eggs,milk and meat, so they fill up on maize or cassava or plaintain porridges. One feels full, but the body absolutely requires the proteins found in eggs, milk and meat to build and repair the body so it begins to deteriorate, the cells actually start to break down. Severe cases have full-body overall edema, skin and hair degradation, organ deterioration, to death. Manifests very quickly with children as their bodies are growing, with slower manifestation in adults whose bodies have stopped growing. The first sign is symptoms from permanent nerve damage. Note also that the nerves are the first to be affected - denied the proteins for the tiny daily repairs. Note that the brain is concentrated with nerves. Plenty of photos of kwashiorko victims online. It's a terrible way to go and is hard to turn around as what is manifesting outside is also manifesting inside. The body's digestive system is degraded and struggles to process even good food - every spoonful must be the most esaily tolerated and highest in benefit until the body can repair itself even to digest food.
Unlike the usual vegetarianism which will include milk, sometimes even eggs, veganism excludes even those protein sources - essentially promoting a diet that mimics a poor villager's poverty diet. In the lands of plenty, it's a self-denial of affordable and varied diet. Veganism is suicide by diet. Yet, it's constantly promoted as 'superior' especially to women and teens, the most needing a good diet to develop a sturdy constitution in the most critical growing years for a good life. Every vegan we have met in the U.S. was manifesting symptoms of nerve damage. Every single one. So much for the enlightening benefits of the "Information Age."
Huh
And in other news you didn't hear... a pair of "married" lesbians committed suicide the day before the Vegan killer opened up on the Youtube campus by driving their van loaded with their 6 adopted children off a cliff. Apparently not particularly interesting to anyone, because boy that really doesn't fit the narrative of peaceable loving gay couples who are excellent parents, does it.
The news is blaming it on KKK. Those are hard to find any more. News motto used to be if it bleeds it leads. Now if it's divisive it's incisive. Or it's not a wreck unless it's politically correct. We tell tales of bad white males.
Good point Paul. But don't lose sight of the reality that Lesbian parents are no different than other parents - the vast majority are good. That was a murder suicide, likely perpetrated by one of the lesbian parents, not both, just like in all the hetero-sexual relationship murder suicides.
I might challenge that notion a bit. I would say that two Lesbian parents are definitely NOT the same as other parents. Emotionally, psychologically or other.
Holly, on what do you base your "reality"? Certainly not the news coverage, which is demonstrably prejudiced to support your reality.
I base it on the decades of information I have been exposed to about homosexuals. They are exactly like everyone else, aside from their sexual preference. And I have read many stories of happy, solid families with homosexual parents over the decades. Perhaps you could clarify why you think lesbian parents are not the same as hetero-sexual parents. They have normal jobs, they are educated, kids go to school, are loved and looked after...? I didn't bother to read the "news" coverage, which is always leftist propaganda nowadays.
Oh god here we go...groan..
Try simple common sense and manners..that'll do me.
Scott Adams discussed her videos on his Periscope, and said he thought they were fascinating and performance art, he speculated the YouTube shooting may have been planned as performance art as well, which makes sense, like Yukio Mishima's suicide as publicity stunt...now that you and Scott Adams have both differed from the official narrative, let's see what happens...demonetization has been demonstrated as not a sound business strategy since it not only endangered the company but also its personnel, in a normal world Susan Wojcicki would lose her job, but will nepotism (which used to be considered evil) prevail?
Dilbert for president!! We haven't had an engineer as president since... uh... Carter... Never mind.
Hey! Give us another chance. There must be a qualified engineer out there somewhere.
One other interesting aspect of BigTech is the chasm between their carefully curated public image and the way they actually behave. The internet was supposed to be the medium that would provide free access to information instead it is functioning as a vehicle for state agitprop, soma and managing public opinion. BigTech has had considerable success exempting itself from the state regulatory apparatus because it has been seen favourably by both sides of the culture war until recently (note that is it pro-diversity but has virtually no diversity in its core tech functions). The right viewed it as successful enterprise the left as an ally in its culture war. Rather implausibly the Democrats have attempted to argue that BigTech helped elect Donald Trump in order to bolster their spurious argument that the election had been rigged by the Russians (thereby de-legitimizing BigTech with the left). The Right on the other hand has woken up to the fact that BigTech is a global operation which shamelessly acts as an agent of state repression for the DNC, the Deep State, Theresa May, Angela Merkel and the PRC simultaneously. Slick marketing has obscured this fact for some time but given the pervasive surveillance opportunities available to bigtech & its near monopoly on access to information if it is not brought within some equitable set of rules it will be able to tyrannize us all without any of us having resort to any judicial review of its capricious conduct.
Mr. Steyn,
It just occurred to me that there might be a racketeering or monopoly lawsuit available against the tech giants. If someone like this is, and others with similar non-violent views are banned from multiple sites it's highly likely that there is cooperation among the tech companies, i.e. a blacklist. If that's the case then it probably crosses the line from free enterprise into organized censorship. I imagine that others have thought of this before me but it seems like a legal angle of a sort.
If everybody in the mark steyn club kick 10 cents each into the tin, we'll have a fighting fund!
"...she complained that she'd had 300,000 hits and YouTube had paid her precisely ten cents..."
I've often wondered how one can know if and how much YouTube is skimming from its users. I've seen advertisements occasionally on channels that I know have been demonetized in the past and I think still are. So how is the viewer that watches the ad or the company that pays for it to know that there's any accountability? When I see an ad in front of one of Lauren Southern's videos how do I know that she's been paid for that? How does Miss Southern know that I've been presented with an ad because of her content when she's been told that she has been demonetized? There's no way for a third party to track accounting. YouTube tells an advertiser that they had 100,000 exposures, it tells the content creator that they've been demonetized, it runs the ads and keeps the revenue. This doesn't happen all the time but I'll bet it happens a lot because there's no accountability. The various departments at YouTube are probably kept separate so that the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing and questions aren't asked. Of course, to work at YouTube you probably need two left hands.
Left is called Left because it's what's left over since the Right is right.
Mark replies:
This is another reason why the Prager suit is pointless. Under YouTube de-monetization, your video gets zip in revenue. Under YouTube "monetization", your video gets tossed a pittance, and YouTube keep over 90 per cent of it for themselves, which they use to promote left-wing causes. So, even as a way of earning revenue for the right, it only ensures the left's advantage increases. Stupid.
The popular media are able to be ideological because that's where their audience is. You can be sure if their users leave because of ideology, they'll change quickly. Apparently socialists are more social. Maybe it's because conservatives have jobs.
But Youtube and Facebook are not the only outlets, and success today doesn't assure success tomorrow. Success is fleeting. As Mark has shown, it's not hard to set up a social media site and make it successful. There are many others. Ask AOL and Myspace how loyal social media users are. They used to be on top, now they're not. A big part of web design is finding and holding an audience, from CRM (customer relations) to SEO (search engine optimization). Trump used it to win the presidency. Marketing will always be a very democratic (small "d") process.
With so many malleable users, social media will control the future. Those who do it well, like the president, will win. Media sites are not "government sponsored enterprises" like banks or utilities, too big to fail. Yet. They can be taken down with better products. Don't bleat. Compete.
I'm guessing the 300,000 viewers visited once. And probably weren't wearing pants. Ten cents was too much.
Ahhh.... money isn't everything. As you are fond of pointing out Mark, the culture matters, and the internet is one way we have of affecting the culture directly. Youtube/Google collects a gatekeeper tax for evil purposes, but they if they allow the content to be disseminated (your videos, StandUpGirl.com stories, Prager University, Jordan Peterson interviews, old movies with traditional values, etc) then culture is affected for the better whether they like it or not. That, I think, is part of the angst right now; the lefty owners of social media are beginning to realize that they can't actually shut off conservative culture without it costing them money.
I agree with your point Mr. Steyn. Other platforms have been set up; Gab.ai is a response to Twitter but without the left wing censorship. I've seen discussion about whether it's a good idea to yield the space to the left and go to a different platform or stay and fight it out. Having left wing and right wing competing video service fractures society even more by further promoting echo chambers, and it's good to be able to continue to promote new ideas to new people instead of preaching to the choir. But it does lead to the money problem. Fortunately YouTube continues to lose money for parent company Gulag but I'm sure that they keep it afloat as a propaganda vehicle for their side.
On the bright side of things, even if someone is demonitized they can still raise money though donors. (Lauren Southern, Dave Rubin, many others do this) This must grate on YouTube because YouTube pays for the infrastructure and doesn't receive ad revenue if they're demonitized, yet the show (literally) goes on. So in some cases a Conservative channel being demonetized is a good thing for the Right as it makes free use of the Left's propaganda machine to get the message out.
My initial concern is that YouTube is playing a shell game by stealing ad revenue while telling content providers that no ads have been run on their channel even though there have been. Perhaps that isn't a violation of the terms of service, I really can't say.
"Yesterday, as I was heading home after our live Clubland Q&A" Stop right there. You're saying you don't do the Clublands from your basement Casbah? This is very disappointing.
You Tube, for most of us, has existed as some sort of sideshow, with some helpful videos about installing a window or changing a Subaru headlamp, with the occasional (plagiarized) Elvis concert.. It is a pleasure, and a wakeup call, to hear Mark's clear-eyed assessment of the free-for-all plagiarism coupled with their self-promoting filters for what it is. Being the eternal optimist, I am hoping for some "alternative" sites that give Breitbart and Persian Vegan Music Videos an open forum, and also hope for the hi-tech programmers seeking gun permits in California. The driving force behind all of this fortune is the tsunami of ad revenue, seeking the latest hot outlet and dumping piles of money blindly. If some other new place to dump ad money arises, Facebook & YouTube just may revert to their inherent value as sites for picture-sharing and how-to videos. Still valuable, but without the Big Buck control.
The recent frenzy over Facebook's "privacy" encroachments is causing introspection throughout the industry. Things will change, but probably not for the better. Facebook is already planning to hire 20,000 censors, 'scuse me, security monitors, this year to deal with it. That will probably improve their ideological consistency, but will focus their ideologies, driving away more users who want broader information.
Political correctness is driving us to an Animal Farm world where homogenized thought prevails. But instead of one "farm" there will be several. Like CNN begat Fox and MSNBC and NRATV, other media sites will arise to cater to tribal interests. Steynonline will grow and Facebook and Youtube will decline. Fox grew to be biggest by promising "fair and balanced." Maybe social and streaming sites will arise to cater to that audience. But every site will need to control their users or else they'll need to hire 20,000 lawyers.
Ultimately, social media's problem isn't privacy, or security, or ideology protection, but dealing with society itself. Ours is fractured and fractious, requiring every company and every indivitdual to maintain a defensive crouch, with a feral watchfulness for attacks from all sides at all times. The Balkans are a model of cooperation, compared to where we're going.
We need to change society if we expect social media to improve. We'll need a serious disaster to pull us together. A good (space) alien invasion would do it. Asteroid strike. Or do it the old fashioned way with a big war. Social media are just the canaries in our shaky coal mine.
Well-said James.
Society isn't going to change David. Humanity is the same world-wide with it's good and bad tendencies and instincts. What is needed is what America has. A constitution that enshrines Freedom of Speech, Personal Liberty (with reasonable boundaries - the Law), and ultimate Governmental Power with the Citizens - not with Big Government or any Tech Entity. These Values are why Facebook and YouTube are beginning to be knocked off there pedestals of power. Equilibrium will return for a while, then be challenged again by human nature and a desire to use power to impose a Worldview or Ideology, as with Zuckerburg and others. He's a good person, just human, and learning a hard lesson. The American Constitution has been challenged before and will be again, but so far ultimate Power to the Citizenry has never lost. It's the key to relative peace and harmony.
Mark, your latest essay is one of the most outstanding of your essays that I read. Essentially it is an abstract of ideas and books that you published over many years. What we the minions that live on this planet face is spreading worldwide conspiracy of elitist to enslave us by limiting our access to true uncensored information and denying our freedom to express our thoughts publicly. Miss Agdahm action demonstrated one of the first manifestation of protest and resistance to the subjugation of her freedom of expression by the elitists that control the social media giants. She demonstrated what many of us feel about the creeping advance of thought police and our helplessness to do something about it peacefully. I find a bit of irony that a relatively recent immigrant to USA sacrificed herself to give live demonstration of Patrick Henry's famous call "Give me Liberty or give death"
I've seen only a small bit of the shooter's home made music video work and I have to say that I really do empathize with her. While most (including myself) would likely call her eccentric, that's not necessarily a bad thing in the entertainment business as it can set you apart from the pack for better or worse. I'm not saying that what she was doing was up my alley, but a long time ago I had a career in the entertainment industry and after working with all kinds of performers in all types of venues I realized that there's an entire marketplace of entertainment and not everyone wants or needs the same kind of shoes to walk their miles in. She obviously put a lot of effort into her work without expectations of fame and massive fortune and whether one likes the finished product or not, it was a labor of love for her. She must have been passionate about it to have pursued it so doggedly, which would have made Gulag's arbitrary manipulation of the fruits of her labor a crime of passion, at least from her side of the fence.
"...because, when you tell someone you can't say that, there's nothing left for him to do but open fire or plant his bomb."
As I mentioned yesterday, but Mr. Steyn has no doubt be saying for decades, when they shut down the marketplace of ideas the conflict moves out into the parking lot and looks a lot different.
It would seem that she was also getting the shaft from Instagram, which means that she was probably on a Silicon Valley content blacklist by the time she decided to take things from the parking lot back inside.
"Silicon Valley content blacklist" implies some sort of cabal controlling individual outlets. Gives new meaning to "star" chamber. These are all mortal competitors, so that seems unlikely. The old saw of the simplest choice being the best comes to mind when watching clips of her little show - no talent. Possibly the clips were selected to show the bad parts, but those parts definitely weren't ready for prime time.
I disagree with your assumption that the tech companies are all competing with each other. Many of them are social media and many aren't (Dropbox, etc.). But even among the social media companies most of them have their own niche and aren't competing with other niches very much. I'm not on Silicon Valley social media aside from my YouTube account, which I only use for viewing, but YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat all serve somewhat different purposes (at least I'm pretty sure), though there may be overlap.
Even if they were all direct competitors it would make my comment about a blacklist even more relevant. How does a person making non-violent nonthreatening and relatively unpopular postings to different networks end up being banned by them? Everyone knows it's because of the ideological bias of the tech giants, but with content going up at an unbelievable rate it can't be a coincidence that these things get flagged by different companies with different algorithms and content types.
I believe that there's a blacklist shared among the ideologues at the different companies and when someone gets a strike in one forum it's known about in others and their content faces subsequently additional screening. If it's true then it's collusion between companies to suppress opinions. I don't know if that's a crime, but someone probably does.
Congratulations Mark! This is the best thing I have read about the YouTube shooting... It reminds me of the Brexit shooting of Labour MP Jo Cox In the run-up to the British referendum... Madman did it, but it reflected the sentiments of a sane population tired of being oppressed and repressed...soBrext won.
Yesterday, I texted a friend and joked that "the time for debate is over" and that we needed "common sense vegan control". As with so many "jokes", the facts can overtake the humor. Murderous rage can poison even the most cleansed of minds and bodies. Tempeh and yoga didn't cause her to "take her guns to town", disenfranchisement did. When speakers can be barred from Speakers' Corner, when anyone from Dennis Prager to a Baha'i (as Ms. Aghdam was) animal rights activists finds himself or herself marginalized from the public square by faceless technocrats, indignation ensues. Which route it takes--lawyers in the courtroom or pistols in the plaza--depends on the mental state of the wronged party. I only wish Ms. Aghdam had followed your example: as the "one man global content provider", you could have taught her a thing or two about building a loyal online following. And dignity in the face of setback.
Disenfranchisement didn't cause her to take her guns to town, but an expectation that her "franchise" deserves support regardless of merit. Our self-esteem industry indoctrinates us to expect equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity. A more rational aspiring dancer would have shot her dance instructor instead. And her set designer. And her costume designer. And her marketing department. She probably didn't realize she had so much to learn.
I just saw a chyron on Fox News that the San Bruno shooter had been interviewed by police a few hours before the shooting and they didn't notice anything unusual about her. This led to a disturbing thought:
What if the police concluded there wasn't anything about her that warranted closer attention because she wasn't all that different from most other young, government educated people? How do you weed out one shooter in (let's just assume) one thousand stereotypical millennials? Were her rantings any different than what we hear people saying about Trump or statues of Robert E. Lee?
Say "Hello" to the Nouveau Robber Barons.
While reading Ann Coulter's column just now I came across the term I was searching for when I posted the above comment. So I'll resubmit:
Say "Hello" to the Nouveau Robber Barons who masquerade as merchants of compassion.
The right to "peacefully petition your government for the redress of grievances" is an important safety valve. You take away it away, whether an auxiliary arm of government or the government yourself, at your own risk. And you get a few who decide "action by the deed", as the old anarchists used to say, is the only option left.
I wonder how many of the Silicon Valley crowd have been uncomfortably reminded that, for all their talk of virtual this and that and the internet of things and networks, they still exist in the physical world to be acted on in unpleasant ways. Mostly, like other elites who are busy destabilizing the West, they still think it's all a grand experiment to be observed from the heights of their castles.
The only other half way decent rationale for reining in Facebook, Google, and Amazon I've heard is along the lines of what we do with public roads: regulate their use by taxing users at different rates for the use they're making of what, in effect, is a telecom version of interstate highways. However, it doesn't take long to think of a few problems with that notion.
All three would seem to challenge the Chicago School of Economics' theory that real monopolies can't exist long. I'm sure the theory will be proven true Real Soon Now.
Google seems to be pretty silly with its demonization. I think even the lads on the The Great War channel got demonetized.
Perhaps PornHub will save us. Ten years from now, I'll be enduring twenty minutes of ads with pants and gasps and promos for the latest GLBTQSB fetish channels and erotic, fully autonomous body piercings before I get to see the latest Steyn video.
And they say our best days are over ...
I don't understand why YouTube isn't being sued for copyright infringement by groups like the RIAA (Recording Industry Associates of America) as well as other groups and individuals. Seems like they're certainly guilty.
Has there already been a lawsuit I'm not aware of?
The RIAA , IFPI and BPI have sued Google YouTube more than once. The latest suit, filed in 2016 and settled in 2017, successfully shut down a stream ripper software component on YouTube where a user could rip an mp3 of any video on the site. Sort of a sloppy illegal file-sharing substitute.
They have also sued Pandora for refusing to pay royalties for pre 1972 music. In my experience, the one thing the RIAA does eagerly is provide work for lawyers.
Last year the US record business finally achieved revenue roughly on par with where they were in 1999. A large component of that revenue is streaming so they wish to have good relations with streaming services generally while suing them for blatant things like providing ripping software. The music business has traded analog dollars for digital pennies over the past 20 years. Artists, songwriters, and many others haven't even seen the pennies.
I can't say for certain but I think both YouTube and Facebook dodge the problem by claiming that they're just hosting third party content... and then they spend money on the appropriate people in the appropriate areas and the problem goes away. Of course in this case the problem went awry. It's a double standard for sure because there were many successful legal prosecutions of sites that hosted torrent files and those sites don't even host the content, just flies that enable you to download the content from many individual places around the planet if you use the appropriate software. I've used torrent file sharing to download free operating systems (one of which I'm using right now to write this), so how that technology is used depends on the user (like firearms or knives or vehicles). I'm not defending the torrent sites, I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy in the application of the law. Torrent sites are theoretically at arms length from the content while YouTube and Facebook are not.
In the last paragraph... it should read US music business, not record business. Touring revenue is huge component which isn't much help to rights holders who can't perform on stage anymore.
Yes, they dodge the legal bullet by claiming that they only host and do not own the content, apparently respecting the content owner's rights. If you can keep from doing an eyeroll after reading that I would be very surprised.
I had a blog for a few years and it was clear on sign-up that I owned the content, Blogger (owned by Google) only hosted it. So if I wrote anything that someone found offensive, Blogger was not responsible, I was. It was a blog about a hobby of sorts and not at all political so I didn't find myself with any issues, but there were definitely a lot of trolls and eventually I got annoyed and deleted the whole thing.
Thanks Terry, I didn't know this. Nor do I really get it. I don't see why ripping is even a problem when you can just see it any time you want anyway. I don't get why you'd want good relations with something that doesn't pay you anything.
I don't understand the reasoning, though. The content is basically stolen goods and just hosting it and making it available isn't much different than having a store which sells goods that other people have stolen. I know pawn shops have to be very careful about that, why doesn't YouTube?
But then I'm no lawyer and there are a lot of things I don't understand.
Steven, like pawn shops, which I am betting are never policed, there are a lot of stolen goods for sale on ebay as well. Too many minor crimes and not enough police resources to go after each small case. Ebay rarely takes action when knockoff products are sold as the real deal, they do not care if a real deal item is stolen and have no way to really know in either case since they never take physical possession of any items. I can guess that an item that is currently available in retail store for $1K and is brand new in the packaging, selling on ebay for $300 is probably stolen. I have no way of knowing for certain, even if I physically acquire the item, but I can be pretty sure.
The user agreement for YouTube is set up like renting a storage locker. If you've got stolen goods in your locker, it would not be the storage company facing charges but if the storage company was knowingly renting space so a huge stolen goods racket was operating out of the facility, then they could possibly be held accountable. YouTube obviously knows about stolen content. Heck, everybody knows.
I could wish that the lordly Editors and Purveyors of The Narrative had half a dozen members who would look at the world spectrum of existing and pending trends, and write for the public enlightenment an essay of the caliber of this one.
They lack even one such member. Perhaps when such appear to be climbing the ranks, they get demonetized.
Weaponization of the internet includes the DoS attack...Denial of Service from hacker zombie computer networks pinging a website with requests until it shuts the website down. In 2007, DoS attacks brought the entire country of Estonia to its knees with a coordinated and massive DOS attack.
Well, the Starbuck-swilling software engineers under the control of their billionaire overlords is a reverse engineered DoS attack...Denial of Speech. In effect, shutting down the views of half of the USA with algorithm based attacks on thought. You're correct, this has the potential to become very, very bad, before it gets worse.
You're correct, shutting down speech is not going to end well, just as the progressive jihab trying to shut down Trump's election is marginalizing flyover country.
We do live in interesting times.
It's asymmetric warfare on free speech. Being arbitrarily "shadow-banned" (even in news media comments) is unbelievably infuriating.
I'm finding over and over again, we in the general citizenry are the number one target to be shut out. The government and the elite would like nothing more than for us to just shut up, shuffle along and not peer up from the work we're doing to keep them happy with the taxes they demand in return for the utterly shoddy services they deliver us.
I certainly hope old "473" doesn't fork out his membership fee and start posting around here.
Sir Harry Flashman (of the Twittersphere) got likes for... "A Steyn on humanity".
Amen. Steyn's clubmember comments are the only ones worth reading out of all the comment threads i've sampled, and I would even add that I find many of them as insightful as Steyn's wisdoms. Hope it stays that way!
It seems to me with all the current turmoil of shootings, gun control, tearing down statues, erasing history, restricting speech, using the federal bureaucracy as a weapon, demonizing people with mere accusations etc....we could use a guiding set of principles that would lay down what we consider acceptable behaviors from our government and its citizenry. Maybe we could call it something catchy like...The United States Constitution.
Just a thought.
A more classroom based approach might be the return of courses in Civics. As Jordan Peterson has been pointing out recently, there has been all kinds of talk for years about rights but absolutely no talk about responsibilities. You can't have one without the other or you wind up where the West is now.
Responsibilities are for "the government", and other people.
100% Joseph.
It is also the continuing narrowing of public space as people become afraid to sit on outdoor terraces in France or patios in California or to stroll through open marketplaces.
As they tighten their grip, it slips through their fingers. Facebook, Google, and Amazon are monopolies, and need to be dealt with accordingly.
Facebook and Google are virtual monopolies, however I don't see Amazon as a monopoly. Please explain.
It's interesting that my Kindle uses Bing as the default search engine. I don't see a way to set Google as the default and I'm totally fine with that.
The Internet was the result of a Cold War U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency initiative undertaken in the 1960s (Sorry, Al. Maybe you can credit yourself with artificial intelligence) that created a computer communications network designed to be decentralized in such a way that eliminates vulnerable weak links, that could otherwise cripple the network. Nodes could be taken out by the Soviets, but the many other remaining nodes would allow the network to continue to function. We now need something similar atop the Internet: a non-centralized, generic, open-source platform to eliminate Silicon Valley's say over who says what.
There are people working on putting together such a system. As I recall, though I didn't follow it too closely, the idea is to use blockchain technology to construct a distributed system that will essentially fill the role of YouTube. I think one of the main problems was system availability. Essentially each person's PC is a node in the system and hosts and serves a small part of the content. The problem arises when that person shuts off their PC, then you need to have redundancy and I don't know how they'll get around that.
Silicon Valley doesn't control who says what. You can put whatever you want on your own site. Just, since most people log in to their Facebook account and mindlessly click on whatever is "trending", or at best Google search things, those two companies can steer people to your site - or away from it. My feeling is that Google is worse than Facebook, but that might be because I am a smidgen too old to be completely obsessed with "social media".
I'm all in for that Mr. Cranfill. Any ideas how we start? Perhaps an "offshore" host that does not limit free speech and would serve as a "platform"? Isn't there a little sovereign island off the coast of England that might benefit from such an opportunity? Yes there is: The "Principality of Sealand" is the name of the place. The United Nations Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) might have something to say about it as the Principality falls within the United Kingdom's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). UNCLOS, however, applies to ocean resources - and not to free speech platforms - which this could ironically become. In fact, I think I'll send the prince an email to see if his platform is up to hosting a free speech one.
As Tom says, blockchain is the most promising technology. It has great potential to disrupt the centralized social media companies. Before long, people whose content is being stolen will stampede away from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter faster than a herd of Hondurans.
Hope you're right sol:))
Don't forget that the victims were taken to Zuckerberg General Hospital! Thought that was a nice bow on this terrible zeitgeisty story.
Ironically, as with Vegas, we will have to wait a long time to see the surveillance video that undoubtedly exists of the Shootout at the UToob Corral..