Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.

For The Record  

FTR #866 Because They Can, Part 2: More about Technocratic Fascism

Dave Emory’s entire life­time of work is avail­able on a flash dri­ve that can be obtained here. The new dri­ve is a 32-giga­byte dri­ve that is cur­rent as of the pro­grams and arti­cles post­ed by late spring of 2015. The new dri­ve (avail­able for a tax-deductible con­tri­bu­tion of $65.00 or more) con­tains FTR #850.  

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This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.

Intro­duc­tion: Some folks just don’t play well with oth­ers. Sad­ly, ter­ri­fy­ing­ly and trag­i­cal­ly, that applies to many key play­ers in the world of Big Tech.

Sup­ple­ment­ing dis­cus­sion pre­sent­ed in FTR #859, we reit­er­ate the intro­duc­tion to that broad­cast.

Albert Ein­stein said of the inven­tion of the atom­ic bomb: “Every­thing has changed but our way of think­ing.” We feel that oth­er, more recent devel­op­ments in the world of Big Tech war­rant the same type of warn­ing.

This pro­gram fur­ther explores the Brave New World being mid­wived by tech­nocrats. These stun­ning devel­op­ments should be viewed against the back­ground of what we call “tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism,” ref­er­enc­ing a vital­ly impor­tant arti­cle by David Golum­bia. ” . . . . Such tech­no­cratic beliefs are wide­spread in our world today, espe­cially in the enclaves of dig­i­tal enthu­si­asts, whether or not they are part of the giant cor­po­rate-dig­i­tal leviathanHack­ers (“civic,” “eth­i­cal,” “white” and “black” hat alike), hack­tivists, Wik­iLeaks fans [and Julian Assange et al–D. E.], Anony­mous “mem­bers,” even Edward Snow­den him­self walk hand-in-hand with Face­book and Google in telling us that coders don’t just have good things to con­tribute to the polit­i­cal world, but that the polit­i­cal world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it: the polit­i­cal world is bro­ken, they appear to think (right­ly, at least in part), and the solu­tion to that, they think (wrong­ly, at least for the most part), is for pro­gram­mers to take polit­i­cal mat­ters into their own hands. . . First, [Tor co-cre­ator] Din­gle­dine claimed that Tor must be sup­ported because it fol­lows direct­ly from a fun­da­men­tal “right to pri­vacy.” Yet when pressed—and not that hard—he admits that what he means by “right to pri­vacy” is not what any human rights body or “par­tic­u­lar legal regime” has meant by it. Instead of talk­ing about how human rights are pro­tected, he asserts that human rights are nat­ural rights and that these nat­ural rights cre­ate nat­ural law that is prop­erly enforced by enti­ties above and out­side of demo­c­ra­tic poli­tiesWhere the UN’s Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion on Human Rights of 1948 is very clear that states and bod­ies like the UN to which states belong are the exclu­sive guar­an­tors of human rights, what­ever the ori­gin of those rights, Din­gle­dine asserts that a small group of soft­ware devel­op­ers can assign to them­selves that role, and that mem­bers of demo­c­ra­tic poli­ties have no choice but to accept them hav­ing that role. . . Fur­ther, it is hard not to notice that the appeal to nat­ural rights is today most often asso­ci­ated with the polit­i­cal right, for a vari­ety of rea­sons (ur-neo­con Leo Strauss was one of the most promi­nent 20th cen­tury pro­po­nents of these views). We aren’t sup­posed to endorse Tor because we endorse the right: it’s sup­posed to be above the left/right dis­tinc­tion. But it isn’t. . . .

Under­scor­ing the “anar­cho-fas­cist” nature of tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism, the broad­cast notes how cryp­to-cur­ren­cies offer the pos­si­bil­i­ty of, what for lack of a bet­ter term, might be called “cyber-off­shoring.” Going the Cay­man Islands and oth­er off­shore tax havens one bet­ter, cryp­to-cur­ren­cy offers the pos­si­bil­i­ty of socio­path­ic eco­nom­ic elites col­laps­ing the nation state by sub­vert­ing rev­enue col­lec­tion. This is the fis­cal wet dream of the eco­nom­ic elites that dom­i­nate right-wing ide­ol­o­gy. “No Tax­es!”

” . . . Gov­ern­ments ini­tial­ly attempt­ing to con­trol cryp­tocur­ren­cy tax­a­tion through the busi­ness­es and bot­tle­necks which it can be mon­i­tored through will meet with as much suc­cess as they have lim­it­ing file shar­ing, ille­gal down­loads, and Tor oper­a­tions. Cryp­tocur­ren­cies have an inher­ent reg­u­la­tion, that of the law from num­berTru­ly, bit­coin is code as law. . . .”

Con­tin­u­ing to explore the tech­no­log­i­cal aspect of cor­po­ratist ide­ol­o­gy, we note that Tar­get stores respond­ed to a vote by their phar­ma­cists to union­ize by intro­duc­ing a new com­mit­ment to robot work­ers. (This is rem­i­nis­cent of a threat to replace fast-food work­ers with “apps,” if they try to obtain a high­er min­i­mum wage.)

Next, we recap an impor­tant arti­cle high­light­ed in FTR #851.  A Bit­coin-inspired tech­nol­o­gy devel­oped by Ethereum appears set to engen­der a num­ber of appalling pos­si­bil­i­ties, includ­ing: the anony­mous, online fund­ing of the assas­si­na­tion of pub­lic offi­cials; the anony­mous sab­o­tag­ing and van­dal­iz­ing of web­sites and last, but cer­tain­ly not least, the replace­ment of third-par­ty human admin­is­tra­tors, such as lawyers with code. It won’t just be fast-food work­ers and low-wage employ­ees at places like Tar­get who lose their jobs to high-tech automa­tion!

The socio­path­ic eth­ic fun­da­men­tal to tech­no­crat­ic fas­cism was artic­u­lat­ed by Ethereum Chief Tech­nol­o­gy Offi­cer Gavin Wood:

” . . . . How­ever, Wood acknowl­edges it is like­ly that Ethereum will be used in ways that break the law—and even says that is part of what makes the tech­nol­ogy inter­est­ingJust as file shar­ing found wide­spread unau­tho­rized use and forced changes in the enter­tain­ment and tech indus­tries, illic­it activ­ity enabled by Ethereum could change the world, he says.

“The poten­tial for Ethereum to alter aspects of soci­ety is of sig­nif­i­cant mag­ni­tude,” says Wood. “This is some­thing that would pro­vide a tech­ni­cal basis for all sorts of social changes and I find that excit­ing.” . . . .

. . . . “You can imple­ment any Web ser­vice with­out there being a legal enti­ty behind it,” he says. “The idea of mak­ing cer­tain things impos­si­ble to leg­is­late against is real­ly inter­est­ing.”

In that same con­text, major finan­cial insti­tu­tions impli­cat­ed in the shenani­gans that brought about the finan­cial col­lapse of 2008, as well as the Libor rig­ging scan­dal have launched the Sym­pho­ny mes­sag­ing sys­tem, which may prove opaque to reg­u­la­tors.

State-of-the-art facial recog­ni­tion soft­ware deployed by the wild­ly pop­u­lar Face­book threat­ens pri­va­cy in unprece­dent­ed ways. Peo­ple should be far more wor­ried about Facebook–with 1.5 bil­lion users–than of the NSA. QUICK: How much influ­ence do YOU have in what Face­book does?!

The pro­gram con­cludes with a look at Indi­an Pre­mier Naren­dra Mod­i’s court­ing of Sil­i­con Val­ley com­pa­nies, includ­ing Zucker­berg’s Face­book.

His polit­i­cal CV is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the oper­a­tions, devel­op­ment and his­to­ry of the RSS, polit­i­cal par­ent to his BJP Par­ty. The RSS is a Hin­du nation­al­ist and fas­cist par­ty, one of whose alum­ni assas­si­nat­ed Mahat­ma Gand­hi.

Recent devel­op­ments have clar­i­fied the degree of con­trol and influ­ence that the RSS exerts on Modi. That con­trol is pro­found and direct.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: 

  • Review of Lucy Komis­ar’s work on “off­shoring.”
  • Review of EBay chief Pierre Omid­yar’s back­ing of Naren­dra Mod­i’s elec­tion.
  • Review of Omid­yar’s role in financ­ing the Maid­an coup.
  • Review of Omid­yar’s finan­cial back­ing of Glenn Green­wald’s recent jour­nal­is­tic efforts.
  • Review of Mod­i’s effort to roll back Indi­a’s child labor laws.
  • Review of the prob­a­ble Under­ground Reich devel­op­ment of Bit­coin. (We dis­cussed Bit­coin, in FTR #‘s 760, 764, 770, 785.)

1a. We by re-exam­in­ing one of the most impor­tant ana­lyt­i­cal arti­cles in a long time, David Golumbi­a’s arti­cle in Uncomputing.org about tech­nocrats and their fun­da­men­tal­ly unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic out­look.

This con­cept is key to under­stand­ing much of what we will dis­cuss.

“Tor, Tech­noc­racy, Democ­ra­cy” by David Golum­bia; Uncomputing.org; 4/23/2015.

” . . . . Such tech­no­cratic beliefs are wide­spread in our world today, espe­cially in the enclaves of dig­i­tal enthu­si­asts, whether or not they are part of the giant cor­po­rate-dig­i­tal leviathan. Hack­ers (“civic,” “eth­i­cal,” “white” and “black” hat alike), hack­tivists, Wik­iLeaks fans [and Julian Assange et al–D. E.], Anony­mous “mem­bers,” even Edward Snow­den him­self walk hand-in-hand with Face­book and Google in telling us that coders don’t just have good things to con­tribute to the polit­i­cal world, but that the polit­i­cal world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it: the polit­i­cal world is bro­ken, they appear to think (right­ly, at least in part), and the solu­tion to that, they think (wrong­ly, at least for the most part), is for pro­gram­mers to take polit­i­cal mat­ters into their own hands. . . First, [Tor co-cre­ator] Din­gle­dine claimed that Tor must be sup­ported because it fol­lows direct­ly from a fun­da­men­tal “right to pri­vacy.” Yet when pressed—and not that hard—he admits that what he means by “right to pri­vacy” is not what any human rights body or “par­tic­u­lar legal regime” has meant by it. Instead of talk­ing about how human rights are pro­tected, he asserts that human rights are nat­ural rights and that these nat­ural rights cre­ate nat­ural law that is prop­erly enforced by enti­ties above and out­side of demo­c­ra­tic poli­ties. Where the UN’s Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion on Human Rights of 1948 is very clear that states and bod­ies like the UN to which states belong are the exclu­sive guar­an­tors of human rights, what­ever the ori­gin of those rights, Din­gle­dine asserts that a small group of soft­ware devel­op­ers can assign to them­selves that role, and that mem­bers of demo­c­ra­tic poli­ties have no choice but to accept them hav­ing that role. . . Fur­ther, it is hard not to notice that the appeal to nat­ural rights is today most often asso­ci­ated with the polit­i­cal right, for a vari­ety of rea­sons (ur-neo­con Leo Strauss was one of the most promi­nent 20th cen­tury pro­po­nents of these views). We aren’t sup­posed to endorse Tor because we endorse the right: it’s sup­posed to be above the left/right dis­tinc­tion. But it isn’t. . . .”

1b. Poten­tial­ly real­iz­ing the eco­nom­ic wet dream of fascist/libertarian ele­ments, cryp­tocur­ren­cy may sub­vert the abil­i­ty of nation states to tax–a func­tion cen­tral to the very con­cept of civic exis­tence! (We dis­cussed Bit­coin, in FTR #‘s 760764770785.)

“Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Tax­a­tion May Sub­vert Nation­al Col­lec­tion” by Travis Patron; Dig­i­nomics; 9/06/2015.

As the age of cryp­tocur­ren­cy comes into full force, it will facil­i­tate a sub­ver­sive­ly viable tax­a­tion avoid­ance strat­e­gy for many of the tech­ni­cal­ly savvy users of peer-to-peer cryp­to­graph­ic pay­ment sys­tems. In doing so, cryp­tocur­ren­cy use will act to erode the tax rev­enue base of nation­al juris­dic­tions, and ulti­mate­ly, repo­si­tion tax­a­tion as a vol­un­tary, pay-for-per­for­mance func­tion. In this post, I’d like to cov­er some of the ben­e­fits such a strat­e­gy will have for cryp­tocur­ren­cy investors, why our notion of tax­a­tion is ripe for dis­rup­tion, and why cryp­tocur­ren­cy tax­a­tion is enabled by default.

Although investors have been lured by the siren song of tax havens for as long as gov­ern­ments have exist­ed, none have exist­ed with the legal and struc­tur­al char­ac­ter­is­tics such as those found in cryp­tocur­ren­cy. By oper­at­ing behind a veil of cyber­secre­cy, it is rea­son­able to fore­cast the imprac­ti­cal­i­ty of sys­temic tax­a­tion on these types of finan­cial assets from nation­al juris­dic­tions. Indi­vid­ual enforce­ment of tax­a­tion is like­wise imprac­ti­cal due to ide­o­log­i­cal back­lash gov­ern­ments would receive for tar­get­ing indi­vid­u­als who avoid nation­al tax­a­tion via infor­ma­tion tech­nolo­gies. Even so, many juris­dic­tions have already declared dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy trans­ac­tions (some­thing which occurs between con­sent­ing par­ties on a net­work which no one owns) to be tax­able under cur­rent legal frame­works.

How can the state lay claim to the right to tax that which they do not issue and can­not con­trol?

Run­ning The Num­bers on Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Tax­a­tion

It has been said that com­pound­ing inter­est is one of the most pow­er­ful forces in the uni­verse. When we apply the black mag­ic of com­pound­ing returns to the prof­it-max­i­miz­ing actions of con­sumers, we see quite clear­ly why every user aware of the ben­e­fits of using cryp­tocur­ren­cy, even if only for the tax-sav­ings, will opt to do so over tra­di­tion­al fiat mon­ey. The allure of avoid­ing the clutch­es of nation­al tax­a­tion is strong enough that any ratio­nal con­sumer will make cryp­tocur­ren­cy a por­tion of their finan­cial port­fo­lio giv­en they have the suf­fi­cient tech­ni­cal under­stand­ing.

James Dale David­son, co-edi­tor of Strate­gic Invest­ment

“Each $5,000 of annu­al tax pay­ments made over a 40-year peri­od reduces your net worth by $2.2 mil­lion assum­ing a 10% annu­al return on your invest­ments,” reports James Dale David­son in The Sov­er­eign Indi­vid­ual: Mas­ter­ing the Tran­si­tion to the Infor­ma­tion Age, “For high income earn­ers in preda­to­ry tax regimes (such as the Unit­ed States), you can expect to lose more of your mon­ey through cumu­la­tive tax­a­tion than you will ever earn.”

As we explained in the report Bit­coin May Become A Glob­al Reserve Instru­ment, nev­er before has there exist­ed a tool that can pre­serve eco­nom­ic and infor­ma­tion­al assets with such a high degree of secu­ri­ty com­bined with a near-zero mar­gin­al cost to the user. This rev­o­lu­tion­ary capa­bil­i­ty of the bit­coin net­work does, and will con­tin­ue to pro­vide, a sub­ver­sive­ly lucra­tive tax super haven in direct cor­re­la­tion with its accep­tance on a world­wide basis.

Gov­ern­ment Response to Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Tax­a­tion

Many gov­ern­ment agen­cies have already cued in to the tax avoid­ance poten­tial of bit­coin and cryp­tocur­ren­cies. How­ev­er, it would seem that they mis­judge this emerg­ing threat loom­ing over their pre­cious tax cof­fers. The Finan­cial Crimes Enforce­ment Net­work in the Unit­ed States (FINCEN) for exam­ple, has already issued guid­ance on cryp­tocur­ren­cy tax­a­tion, yet makes a false dis­tinc­tion between real cur­ren­cy and vir­tu­al cur­ren­cy. FINCEN states that “In con­trast to real cur­ren­cy, “vir­tu­al” cur­ren­cy is a medi­um of exchange that oper­ates like a cur­ren­cy in some envi­ron­ments, but does not have all the attrib­ut­es of real cur­ren­cy,” and lat­er “vir­tu­al cur­ren­cy does not have legal ten­der sta­tus in any juris­dic­tion.” What these agen­cies fail to real­ize, is that cryp­tocur­ren­cy is not vir­tu­al in any sense of the word. Indeed it is as real, and per­haps even more real, than tra­di­tion­al fleet­ing fiat cur­ren­cies.

Bit­coin and cryp­tocur­ren­cy offer a near per­fect alter­na­tive to tra­di­tion­al tax havens which are being tight­ly con­trolled by the new laws asso­ci­at­ed with the For­eign Account Tax Com­pli­ance Act (FATCA). In his report Are Cryp­tocur­ren­cies Super Tax Havens?, Omri Mar­i­an makes clear the pres­sure for finan­cial insti­tu­tions who inter­act with the US bank­ing sys­tem to hand over account hold­ers, and for a crack­down on off­shore tax havens with the enact­ment of FATCA in 2010.

Tax pol­i­cy­mak­ers seem to be oper­at­ing under the faulty assump­tion that cryp­tocur­ren­cy-based economies are lim­it­ed by the size of vir­tu­al economies. The only vir­tu­al aspect of cryp­tocur­ren­cies, how­ev­er, is their form. Their oper­a­tion hap­pens with­in real economies, and as such their growth poten­tial is, at least the­o­ret­i­cal­ly, infi­nite. Such poten­tial, togeth­er with recent devel­op­ments in cryp­tocur­ren­cies mar­kets, should alert pol­i­cy-mak­ers to the urgency of the emerg­ing prob­lem.

– Omri Mar­i­an, Are Cryp­tocur­ren­cies Super Tax Havens?

Cur­rent pay­ment proces­sors such as Bit­Pay have recent­ly revealed that gov­ern­ment agen­cies are watch­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy trans­ac­tions through the bot­tle­necks and exchanges where it can be tracked and traced with a high degree of trans­paren­cy. It should not come to any­ones sur­prise that gov­ern­ments are watch­ing cryp­tocur­ren­cy nor that com­pa­nies are com­ply­ing with their laws, but under­stand­ing why nation­al gov­ern­ments require users of the bit­coin dig­i­tal econ­o­my to cut them a slice of the pie while they con­tribute noth­ing to the oper­a­tion, and in many cas­es, hin­der the adop­tion of this tech­nol­o­gy, remains a cal­lus mys­tery.

Gov­ern­ments ini­tial­ly attempt­ing to con­trol cryp­tocur­ren­cy tax­a­tion through the busi­ness­es and bot­tle­necks which it can be mon­i­tored through will meet with as much suc­cess as they have lim­it­ing file shar­ing, ille­gal down­loads, and Tor oper­a­tions. Cryp­tocur­ren­cies have an inher­ent reg­u­la­tion, that of the law from num­ber. Tru­ly, bit­coin is code as law.

Old laws sel­dom resist the trends of tech­nol­o­gy. The attempt of gov­ern­ment agen­cies to levy tax­a­tion on cryp­tocur­ren­cy trans­ac­tions direct­ly is as futile as sweep­ing back waves of the ocean. No mat­ter the size of broom, state actors will be over­run by con­tin­u­ous­ly expand­ing waves of cryp­tocur­ren­cy adop­tion.

In the 1980s, it was ille­gal in the Unit­ed States to send a fax mes­sage. The US Post Office con­sid­ered fax­es to be first-class mail, over which the US Post Office claimed an ancient monop­oly … bil­lions of fax mes­sages lat­er, it is unclear whether any­one ever com­plied with that law.

– James Dale David­son, William Rees-Mogg, The Sov­er­eign Indi­vid­ual

Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Tax­a­tion By Default

What would you say if you were told cryp­tocur­ren­cy tax­a­tion occurs on every trans­ac­tion by default? In the realm of dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy, the trans­ac­tion fee which the user decides to (or decides not to) attach to each pay­ment rep­re­sents the tax­a­tion. This user can decide to attach a large fee or no fee at all. In doing so, the min­ers of the net­work will choose pref­er­ence for the trans­ac­tions with a larg­er fee attached, and will work to con­firm these pay­ments soon­er than those with small­er fees. This trans­ac­tions queue rep­re­sents a vol­un­tary, pay-for-per­for­mance tax­a­tion struc­ture where the per­for­mance derived from the sys­tem is depen­dent upon how much tax­a­tion they pay.

Algo­rith­mic Reg­u­la­tion

Cryp­tocur­ren­cies have reg­u­la­tion built into the very nature of their exis­tence, just not through our con­ven­tion­al ideas of human inter­ven­tion. Because of the tech­no­log­i­cal nature of cryp­tocur­ren­cy tax­a­tion, judi­cial reg­u­la­tions bestowed upon these types of sys­tems will always be, to a large degree, futile. Cryp­tocur­ren­cies have estab­lished their own set of rules and guide­lines through the source code they are built upon, forc­ing legal frame­works on this type of 21st cen­tu­ry inno­va­tion will only cause fric­tion dur­ing its adop­tion phase.

The only choice of reg­u­la­tion we have in terms of cryp­tocur­ren­cy tax­a­tion is not to try and fit it inside some exist­ing doc­trine, but to abide by their laws of finance and infor­ma­tion free­dom. We must be the one’s to con­form to the reg­u­la­tion, not have it con­form to our con­ven­tion­al beliefs. Bit­coin is a sys­tem which will only be gov­erned effec­tive­ly through dig­i­tal law, an approach which func­tions sole­ly through a medi­um of tech­nol­o­gy itself. It will not bend to the whim of those who still hold con­ven­tion­al forms of law-mak­ing as rel­e­vant today.

For a suc­cess­ful tech­nol­o­gy, real­i­ty must take prece­dence over pub­lic rela­tions, for nature can­not be fooled.

– Richard Feyn­man

Con­clu­sion

When we come to under­stand the sys­temic resilience to judi­cial inter­ven­tion, it becomes quite clear that cryp­tocur­ren­cy tax­a­tion will remain a vol­un­tary, pay-for-per­for­mance func­tion of the net­work itself. No longer will tax­a­tion be enforced through coer­cion, but become a vol­un­tary act towards increased sys­tem per­for­mance.

Make no mis­take, in a cryp­to-anar­chist juris­dic­tion where there is no means to con­fis­cate or con­trol prop­er­ty on behalf of anoth­er indi­vid­ual, the need for the state will cease to exist. Mass tax­a­tion on dig­i­tal cur­ren­cy is not fea­si­ble through judi­cial enforce­ment while indi­vid­ual enforce­ment is bound to prove inef­fec­tive. You, or any­one moti­vat­ed to retain their net worth, will find a sub­ver­sive­ly lucra­tive tax haven in the realm of cryp­tocur­ren­cy.

3a. A har­bin­ger of things to come: if you want to union­ize, you may be replaced by tech­nol­o­gy.

“Day After Employ­ees Vote to Union­ize, Tar­get Announces Fleet of Robot Work­ers” by James Woods; U.S. Uncut; 9/23/2015.

Just a day after phar­ma­cy work­ers from a Brook­lyn Tar­get store formed a union, the com­pa­ny announced plans to replace employ­ees with robot work­ers in the near future.

Last week it was report­ed that the phar­ma­cists had sub­mit­ted their ini­tial “microunion” fil­ing with the Nation­al Labor Rela­tions Board after an ini­tial bal­lot vote was passed 7 ‑2. The fil­ing was note­wor­thy as the work­ers become the first union at any Tar­get store since the retail­er opened in 1902.

Yet, less than a week lat­er, in a seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed press release, Casey Carl, the Chief Tech­nol­o­gy and Strat­e­gy Offi­cer at Tar­get announced the company’s plan to devel­op automa­tion sys­tems and replace work­ers with robots in their retail loca­tions as part of a new pro­gram with Tech­stars, an indus­try leader with a rep­u­ta­tion for accel­er­at­ing star­tups.

“We know that tech­nol­o­gy will con­tin­ue to rev­o­lu­tion­ize retail, and that Target’s future will be built on inno­va­tion. That’s why we’re so excit­ed to part­ner with Tech­stars and invite the world’s most promis­ing star­tups to work with Tar­get right in our back­yard.”

For the last few years, Tar­get has been increas­ing their share of the e‑commerce sec­tor since tak­ing back con­trol of their dig­i­tal ful­fill­ment from Ama­zon, which also uses robot work­ers. But now, they are look­ing to inte­grate that por­tion of their busi­ness with their brick and mor­tar loca­tions to cre­ate a speedy gro­cery deliv­ery ser­vice, which will require an even greater invest­ment in tech­nol­o­gy.

That, com­bined with groups and politi­cians work­ing towards a $15 per hour min­i­mum wage, has pushed Tar­get to announce that with­in two years they will have a “con­cept store” open that will include robots instead of asso­ciates.

Large cor­po­ra­tions such as McDonald’s and Wal-Mart have been using the threat of “auto­mat­ed work­ers” for years to keep wages low and sup­press union growth with­in their stores, but have so far been unsuc­cess­ful in automat­ing the “cus­tomer ser­vice” por­tion of their oper­a­tions.

3b. The rise of “smart con­tracts” may not only enable the suc­cess­ful per­pe­tra­tion of numer­ous kinds of crim­i­nal under­tak­ings, includ­ing the assas­si­na­tion of pub­lic offi­cials, but may replace the use of attor­neys to draft con­tracts. It is not only low-wage work­ers who face unem­ploy­ment real­ized through tech­no­log­i­cal replace­ment! Actu­al­ly, Bit­coin’s Dark Side is pret­ty damn dark, as we saw in FTR #‘s 760764770785.

“Bitcoin’s Dark Side Could Get Dark­er” by Tom Simonite; MIT Tech­nol­ogy Review; 8/13/2015.

Investors see rich­es in a cryp­tog­ra­phy-enabled tech­nol­ogy called smart contracts–but it could also offer much to crim­i­nals.

Some of the ear­li­est adopters of the dig­i­tal cur­rency Bit­coin were crim­i­nals, who have found it invalu­able in online mar­ket­places for con­tra­band and as pay­ment extort­ed through lucra­tive “ran­somware” that holds per­sonal data hostage. A new Bit­coin-inspired tech­nol­ogy that some investors believe will be much more use­ful and pow­er­ful may be set to unlock a new wave of crim­i­nal inno­va­tion.

That tech­nol­ogy is known as smart contracts—small com­puter pro­grams that can do things like exe­cute finan­cial trades or nota­rize doc­u­ments in a legal agree­ment. Intend­ed to take the place of third-par­ty human admin­is­tra­tors such as lawyers, which are required in many deals and agree­ments, they can ver­ify infor­ma­tion and hold or use funds using sim­i­lar cryp­tog­ra­phy to that which under­pins Bit­coin.

Some com­pa­nies think smart con­tracts could make finan­cial mar­kets more effi­cient, or sim­plify com­plex trans­ac­tions such as prop­erty deals (see “The Start­up Meant to Rein­vent What Bit­coin Can Do”). Ari Juels, a cryp­tog­ra­pher and pro­fes­sor at the Jacobs Tech­nion-Cor­nell Insti­tute at Cor­nell Tech, believes they will also be use­ful for ille­gal activity–and, with two col­lab­o­ra­tors, he has demon­strated how.

“In some ways this is the per­fect vehi­cle for crim­i­nal acts, because it’s meant to cre­ate trust in sit­u­a­tions where oth­er­wise it’s dif­fi­cult to achieve,” says Juels.

In a paper to be released today, Juels, fel­low Cor­nell pro­fes­sor Elaine Shi, and Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land researcher Ahmed Kos­ba present sev­eral exam­ples of what they call “crim­i­nal con­tracts.” They wrote them to work on the recent­ly launched smart-con­tract plat­form Ethereum.

One exam­ple is a con­tract offer­ing a cryp­tocur­rency reward for hack­ing a par­tic­u­lar web­site. Ethereum’s pro­gram­ming lan­guage makes it pos­si­ble for the con­tract to con­trol the promised funds. It will release them only to some­one who pro­vides proof of hav­ing car­ried out the job, in the form of a cryp­to­graph­i­cally ver­i­fi­able string added to the defaced site.

Con­tracts with a sim­i­lar design could be used to com­mis­sion many kinds of crime, say the researchers. Most provoca­tively, they out­line a ver­sion designed to arrange the assas­si­na­tion of a pub­lic fig­ure. A per­son wish­ing to claim the boun­ty would have to send infor­ma­tion such as the time and place of the killing in advance. The con­tract would pay out after ver­i­fy­ing that those details had appeared in sev­eral trust­ed news sources, such as news wires. A sim­i­lar approach could be used for less­er phys­i­cal crimes, such as high-pro­file van­dal­ism.

“It was a bit of a sur­prise to me that these types of crimes in the phys­i­cal world could be enabled by a dig­i­tal sys­tem,” says Juels. He and his coau­thors say they are try­ing to pub­li­cize the poten­tial for such activ­ity to get tech­nol­o­gists and pol­icy mak­ers think­ing about how to make sure the pos­i­tives of smart con­tracts out­weigh the neg­a­tives.

“We are opti­mistic about their ben­e­fi­cial appli­ca­tions, but crime is some­thing that is going to have to be dealt with in an effec­tive way if those ben­e­fits are to bear fruit,” says Shi.

Nico­las Christin, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity who has stud­ied crim­i­nal uses of Bit­coin, agrees there is poten­tial for smart con­tracts to be embraced by the under­ground. “It will not be sur­pris­ing,” he says. “Fringe busi­nesses tend to be the first adopters of new tech­nolo­gies, because they don’t have any­thing to lose.”

...

Gavin Wood, chief tech­nol­ogy offi­cer at Ethereum, notes that legit­i­mate busi­nesses are already plan­ning to make use of his technology—for exam­ple, to pro­vide a dig­i­tally trans­fer­able proof of own­er­ship of gold.

How­ever, Wood acknowl­edges it is like­ly that Ethereum will be used in ways that break the law—and even says that is part of what makes the tech­nol­ogy inter­est­ing. Just as file shar­ing found wide­spread unau­tho­rized use and forced changes in the enter­tain­ment and tech indus­tries, illic­it activ­ity enabled by Ethereum could change the world, he says.

“The poten­tial for Ethereum to alter aspects of soci­ety is of sig­nif­i­cant mag­ni­tude,” says Wood. “This is some­thing that would pro­vide a tech­ni­cal basis for all sorts of social changes and I find that excit­ing.”

For exam­ple, Wood says that Ethereum’s soft­ware could be used to cre­ate a decen­tral­ized ver­sion of a ser­vice such as Uber, con­nect­ing peo­ple want­ing to go some­where with some­one will­ing to take them, and han­dling the pay­ments with­out the need for a com­pany in the mid­dle. Reg­u­la­tors like those har­ry­ing Uber in many places around the world would be left with noth­ing to tar­get. “You can imple­ment any Web ser­vice with­out there being a legal enti­ty behind it,” he says. “The idea of mak­ing cer­tain things impos­si­ble to leg­is­late against is real­ly inter­est­ing.”

4. Sym­phony, Wall Street’s fan­cy new bank-to-bank mes­sag­ing sys­tem that sports super-encryp­tion even the gov­ern­ment can’t break, just went live. And they did so only after com­ing to an agree­ment with the New York Depart­ment of Finan­cial Ser­vices over con­cerns that Symphony’s clients were going to be hid­ing incrim­i­nat­ing evi­dence from reg­u­la­tors: Sym­phony agrees to keep copies of client mes­sages for sev­en years. Addi­tion­ally, for four banks — Gold­man Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Cred­it Suisse and Bank of New York Mel­lon — that are both investors in Sym­phony and, in most cas­es, per­pe­tra­tors of the giant Libor-rig­ging car­tel arranged via a chat sys­tem, they also have to give copies of their encryp­tion keys to an inde­pen­dent cus­to­di­an.

So with those safe­guards in place, Wall Street’s con­trolled infor­ma­tion black hole is now a real­ity:

“Mes­sag­ing Ser­vice Sym­phony Dodges Reg­u­la­tory Action Ahead of Launch” by Arik Hes­sel­dahl; Re/Code; 9/14/2015.

Sym­phony, the secure mes­sag­ing com­pany backed by 15 Wall Street banks, will launch on Tues­day after ham­mer­ing out a deal with a reg­u­la­tory agency that once threat­ened to shut down the first real chal­lenge to the Bloomberg Ter­mi­nal.

Three years in the mak­ing, Sym­phony was born out of des­per­a­tion among the world’s most pow­er­ful finan­cial firms and invest­ment hous­es to break free of Bloomberg’sstran­gle­hold on finan­cial soft­ware, data and news. Long before peo­ple used Face­book, MySpace, Twit­ter or AOL Instant Mes­sen­ger, finan­cial pro­fes­sion­als depend­ed on the ter­mi­nal to chat with and keep track of one anoth­er. Today, the ter­mi­nal con­fers sta­tus and priv­i­lege to the more than 325,000 finan­cial pros who pay $24,000 a year to use it.

Symphony’s cloud-based mes­sag­ing ser­vice does two things: It uses advanced encryp­tion tech­niques in order to keep sen­si­tive mes­sages — instant mes­sages most­ly — locked up and out of the hands of hack­ers. But since it’s designed for finan­cial com­pa­nies, which are required by law to keep copies of their mes­sages for sev­eral years in case reg­u­la­tors or law enforce­ment ever needs them for an inves­ti­ga­tion, it has also been designed to work in con­cert with what­ever com­pli­ance tools those com­pa­nies have in place.

So when the New York Depart­ment of Finan­cial Ser­vices raised sus­pi­cions over the sum­mer that banks might use Symphony’s encryp­tion tech­nol­ogy to avoid the pry­ing eyes of reg­u­la­tors, it seemed plau­si­ble that the com­pany could face restric­tions on how it does busi­ness.

That didn’t hap­pen. Instead, on Mon­day Sym­phony announced a deal with the DFS under which it agreed to store for sev­en years copies of mes­sages that its clients send on the ser­vice. Addi­tion­ally, four banks (Gold­man Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Cred­it Suisse and Bank of New York Mel­lon) which are both cus­tomers of and investors in Sym­phony agreed to turn over copies of their encryp­tion keys to an inde­pen­dent cus­to­dian. When a reg­u­la­tor wants to review encrypt­ed mes­sages, they will be able to decrypt them upon request.

“The agree­ment is anoth­er pos­i­tive devel­op­ment on the eve of Symphony’s launch,” the com­pany said in a state­ment emailed to Re/code. “Symphony’s plat­form safe­guards against cyber-threats while strength­en­ing cus­tomers’ com­pli­ance oper­a­tions and facil­i­tat­ing their abil­ity to meet their reg­u­la­tory oblig­a­tions. Sym­phony can store data secure­ly for as long as its cus­tomers request, and its end-to-end encryp­tion ensures mes­sages are secure. Sym­phony pro­vides state-of-the-art cyber-secu­ri­ty for insti­tu­tions oper­at­ing in com­plex reg­u­la­tory envi­ron­ments.”

It’s not entire­ly the end of the reg­u­la­tory road for Sym­phony: Over the sum­mer Sen. Eliz­a­beth War­ren wrote a let­ter to fed­eral reg­u­la­tors express­ing wor­ries sim­i­lar to those of DFS, and there are ques­tions pend­ing too from inter­na­tional reg­u­la­tory bod­ies. But none of them are espe­cially wor­ry­ing to CEO David Gurle.

“We’ve engaged in a series of meet­ings with reg­u­la­tors where we demon­strate that we have capa­bil­i­ties that can be used by reg­u­la­tors to car­ry out any kind of inves­ti­ga­tion they may want to do,” he told Re/code in an inter­view ear­lier this month. “What we do enhances the abil­ity of our clients to meet their legal and reg­u­la­tory oblig­a­tions, but it also gives them the added ben­e­fit of secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions.”

...

It’s not entire­ly the end of the reg­u­la­tory road for Sym­phony: Over the sum­mer Sen. Eliz­a­beth War­ren wrote a let­ter to fed­eral reg­u­la­tors express­ing wor­ries sim­i­lar to those of DFS, and there are ques­tions pend­ing too from inter­na­tional reg­u­la­tory bod­ies. But none of them are espe­cially wor­ry­ing to CEO David Gurle.
...

5. Face­book’s facial recog­ni­tion soft­ware con­tin­ues to be a source of con­tro­ver­sy and lit­i­ga­tion. Bear in mind that Face­book is also devel­op­ing apps that per­mit peo­ple’s smart phones to be turned on remote­ly, in order to mon­i­tor the type of music they (and their friends and asso­ciates) enjoy. They are also imple­ment­ing an app that will per­mit finan­cial insti­tu­tions to deny peo­ple cred­it on the basis of the cred­it-wor­thi­ness of their friends and asso­ciates!

“Face­book Keeps Get­ting Sued Over Face-Recog­ni­tion Soft­ware, And Pri­vacy Groups Say We Should Be Pay­ing More Atten­tion” by Christo­pher Zara; Inter­na­tional Busi­ness Times; 9/3/2015.

Who owns your face? Believe it or not, the answer depends on which state you live in, and chances are, you live in one that hasn’t even weighed in yet.

That could soon change. For the fourth time this year, Face­book Inc. was hit with a class-action law­suit by an Illi­nois res­i­dent who says its face-recog­ni­tion soft­ware vio­lates an unusu­al state pri­vacy law there. The lat­est com­plaint, filed Mon­day, under­scores a qui­et but high-stakes legal bat­tle for the social net­work­ing giant, one that could rever­ber­ate through­out the rest of the U.S. tech indus­try and much of the pri­vate sec­tor.

With almost 1.5 bil­lion active users, Face­book has amassed what prob­a­bly is the world’s largest pri­vate data­base of “faceprints,” dig­i­tal scans that con­tain the unique geo­met­ric pat­terns of its users’ faces. The com­pany says it uses these iden­ti­fiers to auto­mat­i­cally sug­gest pho­to tags. When users upload new pic­tures to the site, an algo­rithm cal­cu­lates a numer­ic val­ue based on a person’s unique facial fea­tures. Face­book pitch­es the fea­ture as just anoth­er con­ve­nient way to stay con­nected with friends, but pri­vacy and civ­il rights advo­cates say the data gen­er­ated by face-recog­ni­tion tech­nol­ogy is unique­ly sen­si­tive, and requires extra spe­cial safe­guards as it finds its way into the hands of pri­vate com­pa­nies.

“You can’t turn off your face,” said Alvaro M. Bedoya, found­ing exec­u­tive direc­tor of George­town University’s Cen­ter on Pri­vacy & Tech­nol­ogy. “Yes, it’s 2015, and yes, we’re tracked in a mil­lion dif­fer­ent ways, but for most of those forms of track­ing, I can still turn it off if I want to.”

Faceprints Are Most­ly Unreg­u­lat­ed

Cur­rently, there are no com­pre­hen­sive fed­eral reg­u­la­tions gov­ern­ing the com­mer­cial use of bio­met­rics, the cat­e­gory of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy that includes faceprints. And Bedoya said the gov­ern­ment appears to be in no hur­ry to address the issue.

Ear­lier this year, the Cen­ter on Pri­vacy & Tech­nol­ogy was one of a num­ber of pri­va­cy-rights groups — along with the Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foun­da­tion and the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union, among oth­ers — that with­drew from dis­cus­sions on how to craft guide­lines for face-recog­ni­tion tech­nol­ogy. After months of nego­ti­a­tions, Bedoya said the groups grew frus­trated by tech indus­try trade asso­ci­a­tions that would not agree to even the most min­i­mal of pro­tec­tions, includ­ing a rule that would require com­pa­nies to obtain writ­ten con­sent before col­lect­ing and stor­ing faceprints on con­sumers.

“When not a sin­gle trade asso­ci­a­tion would agree to that, we just real­ized we weren’t deal­ing with peo­ple who were there to nego­ti­ate,” Bedoya said. “We were there to deal basi­cally with peo­ple who want­ed to stop the process, or make it some­thing that was watered down.”

But Illi­nois is dif­fer­ent. It’s one of only two states — the oth­er being Texas — to reg­u­late bio­met­rics in the pri­vate sec­tor. Illi­nois passed its Bio­met­ric Infor­ma­tion Pri­vacy Actin 2008, back when Face­book was still in its rel­a­tive infan­cy and most com­pa­nies were not think­ing about face-recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy.

“I think we were ahead of the curve,” said Mary Dixon, leg­isla­tive direc­tor for the ACLU of Illi­nois, which advanced the ini­tia­tive. “I think it’d be hard to pass sim­i­lar ini­tia­tives now giv­en the intense lob­by against some of the pro­tec­tions we were able to advance.”

Lit­i­ga­tion Face­off

Illi­nois’ law went pret­ty much unno­ticed until April of this year, when a high-pro­file pri­vacy lawyer filed a law­suit in fed­eral court on behalf of a Face­book user who charges that Face­book is col­lect­ing and stor­ing faceprints on its users with­out obtain­ing informed writ­ten con­sent, a vio­la­tion of Illi­nois’ BIPA. The suit is fed­eral because Face­book is based in Cal­i­for­nia and the pro­posed plain­tiff class poten­tially num­bers in the mil­lions. Since then, at least three more fed­eral law­suitswere filed, each mak­ing sim­i­lar claims. The lat­est suit comes from Fred­er­ick William Gullen, an Illi­nois res­i­dent who doesn’t even have a Face­book account, but who insists that Face­book cre­ated a tem­plate of his face when anoth­er user uploaded a pho­to of him.

“Face­book is active­ly col­lect­ing, stor­ing, and using — with­out pro­vid­ing notice, obtain­ing informed writ­ten con­sent or pub­lish­ing data reten­tion poli­cies — the bio­met­rics of its users and unwit­ting non-users ... Specif­i­cally, Face­book has cre­ated, col­lected and stored over a bil­lion ‘face tem­plates’ (or ‘face prints’) — high­ly detailed geo­met­ric maps of the face — from over a bil­lion indi­vid­u­als, mil­lions of whom reside in the State of Illi­nois.”

A Face­book spokes­woman said the law­suits are with­out mer­it and the com­pany will defend itself vig­or­ously against them, but the real­ity is, the cas­es could play out in a num­ber of ways giv­en that face recog­ni­tion is large­ly untest­ed legal ter­ri­to­ry.

Dixon and oth­er legal experts famil­iar with BIPA say Face­book prob­a­bly will argue that because its faceprints are derived from pho­tographs, they are exempt from BIPA’s con­sent require­ments. Shut­ter­fly Inc., anoth­er Inter­net com­pany being sued in Illi­nois over facial-recog­ni­tion tech­nol­ogy, is argu­ing a sim­i­lar stance. Although BIPA clear­ly con­sid­ers scans of “hand or face geom­e­try” to be bio­met­ric iden­ti­fiers, it also says pho­tographs are not. Bedoya said the word­ing of the law rais­es a “seem­ing con­tra­dic­tion” that defen­dants fight­ing BIPA law­suits might be able to exploit.

“The law was writ­ten in a way that could have been clear­er,” he said.

Face­book points out that users can turn off tag sug­ges­tions, but Dixon said BIPA was writ­ten to ensure that bio­met­ric data col­lec­tion does not take place with­out writ­ten con­sent exe­cuted by the sub­ject of the bio­met­ric iden­ti­fier. The law also makes it ille­gal to sell, lease or oth­er­wise prof­it from a customer’s bio­met­ric infor­ma­tion, a par­tic­u­lar thorn in the side for com­pa­nies that trade in per­sonal data.

The Face­book and Shut­ter­fly law­suits will be close­ly watched as pol­i­cy­mak­ers in oth­er states con­sider craft­ing bills gov­ern­ing the use of bio­met­rics. Mean­while, pri­vacy advo­cates say we should all be pay­ing atten­tion. As face-recog­ni­tion tech­nol­ogy becomes more per­va­sive, it will have increas­ing impli­ca­tions for our lives, both online and off.

“There’s an awful lot at stake here,” Bedoya said. “In the end, do we want to live in a soci­ety where every­one is iden­ti­fied all the time the minute they walk out into pub­lic? I think most peo­ple aren’t ready for that world.”

6. Epit­o­miz­ing the amoral per­spec­tive lurk­ing behind the very suc­cess­ful pub­lic rela­tions man­i­fest­ed by Big Tech is their court­ing of Naren­dra Modi.

“Naren­dra Modi, Indi­an Pre­mier, Courts Sil­i­con Val­ley to Try and Ease Nation’s Pover­ty” by Vin­du Goel; The New York Times; 9/27/2015.

Naren­dra Modi and Mark Zucker­berg have much in com­mon.

Mr. Modi, the prime min­is­ter of India, over­sees a nation of 1.25 bil­lion peo­ple. Mr. Zucker­berg, the chief exec­u­tive of Face­book, runs a social net­work with 1.5 bil­lion active users. Both see them­selves as glob­al lead­ers push­ing for broad social change, and both rou­tine­ly use social media to com­mu­ni­cate with their many mil­lions of fans.

On Sun­day, the two men engaged in a mutu­al admi­ra­tion ses­sion at Face­book’s Sil­i­con Val­ley head­quar­ters, with Mr. Modi field­ing pre­s­e­lect­ed ques­tions from a crowd of Face­book employ­ees and guests invit­ed by the Indi­an Embassy.

Mr. Modi praised social net­works like Face­book, Twit­ter and even China’s Wei­bo as use­ful tools for gov­ern­ing and diplo­ma­cy. . . .

. . . . Sil­i­con Val­ley has been eager to assist. . . . .

7. In FTR #795, we detailed the his­tor­i­cal evo­lu­tion of the polit­i­cal ascent of Naren­dra Modi. His polit­i­cal CV is inex­tri­ca­bly linked with the oper­a­tions, devel­op­ment and his­to­ry of the RSS, polit­i­cal par­ent to his BJP Par­ty. The RSS is a Hin­du nation­al­ist and fas­cist par­ty, one of whose alum­ni assas­si­nat­ed Mahat­ma Gand­hi.

Recent devel­op­ments have clar­i­fied the degree of con­trol and influ­ence that the RSS exerts on Modi. That con­trol is pro­found and direct.

We also note that Mod­i’s elec­tion was engi­neered to a con­sid­er­able extent by Pierre Omid­yar, the top dog at EBay. Omid­yar also helped bankroll the Maid­an coup, that placed the heirs to the OUN/B, Third Reich-allied fas­cists in pow­er. We should nev­er for­get that it is Omid­yar who has bankrolled Cit­i­zen Green­wald’s jour­nal­is­tic ven­tures.

Modi says he wants to court Big Tech to raise his coun­try out of pover­ty. As we not­ed in FTR #851, he is also try­ing to do that by relax­ing his coun­try’s child labor laws!

“Modi Blows His Cov­er – and the Loss is India’s” by M.K. Bhadraku­mar; Asia Times; 9/10/2015.

India recent­ly wit­nessed a strange spec­ta­cle of Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi and his cab­i­net col­leagues sub­ject­ing them­selves to an intense scruti­ny by the Rashtriya Swayam­se­vak Sangh or RSS, the Hin­du nation­al­ist orga­ni­za­tion, regard­ing their ‘per­for­mance’ in office.

Modi him­self used to be an activist of the RSS. But an elab­o­rate cha­rade was kept so far that Modi was in com­mand of the gov­ern­ment.

The Indi­an media has since report­ed that the RSS even­tu­ally gave ‘thumbs up’ to the gov­ern­ment after Modi and his cab­i­net col­leagues trooped in to meet the RSS boss­es and tes­ti­fied at the hear­ing on their ‘schemes and achieve­ments’ in the gov­ern­ment.

No Indi­an gov­ern­ment has ever been made to look so fool­ish and dif­fi­dent.

Why the RSS decid­ed to sub­ject Modi and his cab­i­net to such a dress­ing down pub­licly is anybody’s guess. Per­haps, it was to project the RSS itself as god almighty in the Modi era. But then, it is an open secret that the Hin­du fun­da­men­tal­ist groups are call­ing the shots in the gov­ern­ment, pen­e­trat­ing all walks of nation­al life sys­tem­at­i­cally and impos­ing their agen­da.

The upshot of the RSS hear­ing is that Modi has blown his ‘cov­er’, which helped him so far as prime min­is­ter to cre­ate an impres­sion that he is a human­ist and a devout fol­lower of Bud­dhism who viewed with dis­taste the excess­es com­mit­ted by the Hin­du zealots on the minor­ity com­mu­ni­ties in India such as the attacks on Chris­t­ian church­es.

Under the Modi gov­ern­ment, inci­dents of com­mu­nal ten­sion involv­ing Hin­dus and Mus­lims have sharply increased, accord­ing to offi­cial sta­tis­tics. How­ever, observers have gen­er­ously absolved the prime min­is­ter him­self of any respon­si­bil­ity in this regard, and are will­ing to sus­pend dis­be­lief. The ‘cov­er’ has now been blown.

The fall­out of this on the India-Pak­istan rela­tion­ship can be seri­ous. Obvi­ously, Modi can no longer main­tain with cred­i­bil­ity his stance that he seeks friend­ly rela­tions between India and Pak­istan.

In fact, fol­low­ing the cross-exam­i­na­tion of the gov­ern­ment min­is­ters, the RSS spokes­men in their media brief­ings inter alia brought up the explo­sive doc­trine of ‘Akhand Bharat’ as the guid­ing prin­ci­ple for the Modi gov­ern­ment as regards the India-Pak­istan rela­tion­ship.

Broad­ly, the RSS’s doc­trine is that the great Par­ti­tion of the sub­con­ti­nent in 1947, which led to the cre­ation of Pak­istan, was an aber­ra­tion that can still be got undone if only India worked toward such an objec­tive.

Pak­istan has always had a lurk­ing sus­pi­cion that there is real­ly no day­light pos­si­ble between Modi and the RSS. What used to be a dark sus­pi­cion is now like­ly to become an arti­cle of faith. Pakistan’s advi­sor to the prime min­is­ter on nation­al secu­rity Sar­taj Aziz (who is the de fac­to for­eign min­is­ter) has been quot­ed as say­ing Wednes­day that in Islamabad’s esti­ma­tion, the Modi gov­ern­ment won the 2014 par­lia­men­tary poll on the basis of ‘anti-Pak­istan plat­form’ and has been pur­su­ing the same pol­icy from ‘day one’.

Aziz said, “They (Modi gov­ern­ment) want bet­ter ties, but on their own terms”.

To be sure, the mutu­al rhetoric makes the prospect of a resump­tion of India-Pak­istan dia­logue a remote pos­si­bil­ity. And it should be a safe con­clu­sion that the India-Pak­istan nor­mal­iza­tion will remain elu­sive as long as the Modi gov­ern­ment remains in pow­er.

Do the RSS big­wigs and their wards in the gov­ern­ment real­ize what colos­sal dam­age they are caus­ing to India’s nation­al inter­ests? The 31 per­cent vote share Modi man­aged to gar­ner in the poll last year to cre­ate India’s first ever RSS-run gov­ern­ment does not give these peo­ple the right to super­im­pose their sec­tar­ian agen­da on the entire nation.

India’s nation­al inter­est lies in cre­at­ing a peace­ful exter­nal envi­ron­ment in the imme­di­ate neigh­bor­hood that enables the coun­try to focus on the devel­op­ment chal­lenge through the nar­row cor­ri­dor of time of the next 15–20 years.

Yet, what India is wit­ness­ing is a ratch­et­ing up of ten­sions in the rela­tions with Pak­istan. The past week alone began with India’s army chief Gen­eral Dal­bir Singh shed­ding his fab­u­lous rep­u­ta­tion for being a strong silent sol­dier of dis­cre­tion and reserve – pre­sum­ably, on instruc­tions from the polit­i­cal lead­er­ship – to under­score the readi­ness of the armed forces to wage a ‘swift, short’ war with Pak­istan.

It was an incred­i­bly tact­less state­ment to have been made in the present tense cli­mate of bilat­eral ties with Pak­istan. Besides, the bril­liant gen­eral should cer­tainly know that the only way he could ensure that a war with Pak­istan remained ‘swift’ and ‘short’ would be by nuk­ing that coun­try in the dead of the night.

You don’t need a Clause­witz to explain that the ‘kinet­ics’ of war with Pak­istan (nuclear pow­er with big­ger arse­nal than India’s and with sec­ond-strike capa­bil­ity) will ulti­mately depend on a vari­ety of fac­tors that are way beyond the con­trol of any­one in New Del­hi, civil­ian or mil­i­tary.

Now, it is into this com­bustible mix of rhetoric that the RSS boss­es pre­sented their stark reminder to Pak­istan that India has nev­er real­ly rec­on­ciled with the cre­ation of that coun­try in 1947.

...

As for his Indi­an counterpart’s dire warn­ing, Gen. Sharif was plain­ly dis­mis­sive: “Armed forces of Pak­istan are ful­ly capa­ble to deal all types of inter­nal and exter­nal threats, may it be con­ven­tional or sub-con­ven­tion­al; whether it is cold start or hot start. We are ready!!”

Are we hear­ing the beat­ing of drum pre­sag­ing the begin­ning of anoth­er bloody round of ‘low inten­sity war’ (read vicious cycle of cross-bor­der ter­ror­ism), which cost India heav­ily in human and mate­r­ial trea­sure? Or, could it be that India and Pak­istan are inch­ing toward anoth­er full-fledged war? Time only can tell.

Most cer­tainly, peo­ple in respon­si­ble posi­tion should be care­ful about what they say in pub­lic. What Gen. Dal­bir Singh said about ‘short, swift’ war was prob­a­bly fit for a closed-door meet­ing with the Direc­tor-Gen­er­al of Mil­i­tary Oper­a­tions at the Army Com­man­ders Con­fer­ence but not as the stuff of grand­stand­ing.

Equal­ly, while the RSS boss­es may not be pub­lic offi­cials, they hap­pen to be extra-con­sti­tu­tion­al author­i­ties wield­ing more pow­er than many erst­while emper­ors in India’s medieval his­tory – and they tend to be tak­en seri­ously. Sim­ply put, they should know that the notion of ‘Akhand Bharat’ has no place in the 21st cen­tury world order.

India is not pre­sent­ing a con­vinc­ing pic­ture as a respon­si­ble mem­ber of the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity when the so-called movers and shak­ers in the coun­try behave like hol­low men.

The point is, India is keen to secure a seat in the UN Secu­rity Coun­cil as a per­ma­nent mem­ber on the plea that it wants to con­tribute to inter­na­tional secu­rity and world peace and devel­op­ment. Fun­nily, yoga, which Modi has begun prop­a­gat­ing under the UN aus­pices for the good of the soul and body of mankind, is itself all about self-con­trol.

And, yet, in its own region, India choos­es to pre­oc­cupy itself with sly thoughts about wag­ing a ‘swift short’ war with its unfriend­ly neigh­bor and har­bors delu­sion­ary notions of doing away with a sov­er­eign inde­pen­dent nation that came into being 68 years ago.

The Jekyll-and-Hyde split per­son­al­ity does not do good to India’s image. The coun­try would have been far bet­ter off if Modi hadn’t blown his ‘cov­er’ as a human­ist and a mod­ern­iz­er.

...
India’s nation­al inter­est lies in cre­at­ing a peace­ful exter­nal envi­ron­ment in the imme­di­ate neigh­bor­hood that enables the coun­try to focus on the devel­op­ment chal­lenge through the nar­row cor­ri­dor of time of the next 15–20 years.

Yet, what India is wit­ness­ing is a ratch­et­ing up of ten­sions in the rela­tions with Pak­istan. The past week alone began with India’s army chief Gen­eral Dal­bir Singh shed­ding his fab­u­lous rep­u­ta­tion for being a strong silent sol­dier of dis­cre­tion and reserve – pre­sum­ably, on instruc­tions from the polit­i­cal lead­er­ship – to under­score the readi­ness of the armed forces to wage a ‘swift, short’ war with Pak­istan.

It was an incred­i­bly tact­less state­ment to have been made in the present tense cli­mate of bilat­eral ties with Pak­istan. Besides, the bril­liant gen­eral should cer­tainly know that the only way he could ensure that a war with Pak­istan remained ‘swift’ and ‘short’ would be by nuk­ing that coun­try in the dead of the night.

You don’t need a Clause­witz to explain that the ‘kinet­ics’ of war with Pak­istan (nuclear pow­er with big­ger arse­nal than India’s and with sec­ond-strike capa­bil­ity) will ulti­mately depend on a vari­ety of fac­tors that are way beyond the con­trol of any­one in New Del­hi, civil­ian or mil­i­tary.
...

Discussion

6 comments for “FTR #866 Because They Can, Part 2: More about Technocratic Fascism”

  1. The New York­er has a big new pro­file on Reid Hoff­man, one of the orig­i­nal mem­bers of the Pay­Pal Mafia and a long-time friend of Peter Thiel going back to their days at Stan­ford. But Hoff­man, it should be not­ed, is not an uber-Lib­er­tar­i­an like Thiel. Quite the oppo­site it would seem, giv­en his exten­sive dona­tions to the Demo­c­ra­t­ic par­ty and self-pro­fessed gen­er­al pro­gres­sive world­view. So there’s at least one non-uber-lib­er­tar­i­an throw­ing around his Pay­Pal Mafia bil­lions, which is nice in some ways, although it makes Hoff­man’s quest to turn the future of employ­ment into the unholy love child of LinkedIn and Uber per­haps even more dis­turb­ing than it oth­er­wise would have been:

    The New York­er
    The Net­work Man
    Reid Hoffman’s big idea.

    By Nicholas Lemann

    Octo­ber 12, 2015 Issue

    Ear­ly on a Mon­day evening in June, Reid Hoff­man, the founder and exec­u­tive chair­man of the busi­ness-ori­ent­ed net­work­ing site LinkedIn, met Mark Pin­cus, the founder and chief exec­u­tive of the gam­ing site Zyn­ga, for din­ner at a casu­al restau­rant in Por­to­la Val­ley, Cal­i­for­nia, a wealthy res­i­den­tial town at the west­ern edge of Sil­i­con Val­ley. Break­fasts and din­ners are a big part of Hoffman’s life. He recent­ly pub­lished two books on how to be suc­cess­ful in busi­ness, and is fin­ish­ing a third, whose work­ing title is “Blitzs­cal­ing.” His busi­ness is based on the idea of man­ag­ing your career through relent­less net­work­ing, which is some­thing he enjoys.

    If some­one told you that Hoff­man was the equip­ment man­ag­er for a Pearl Jam tour, it wouldn’t seem like a cast­ing error. He is a big, broad-faced man with tou­sled brown hair, who typ­i­cal­ly dress­es for work in black shorts, a black T‑shirt, run­ning shoes, and white socks. He befriend­ed Pin­cus about twen­ty years ago, when the two met in the Bay Area to dis­cuss busi­ness ideas, and dis­cov­ered that they both believed that social media would be the next big thing in Sil­i­con Val­ley. At din­ner, Hoff­man was wear­ing two watch­es, one on each wrist—an Apple Watch and a com­pet­ing product—so he could see which one he liked bet­ter. He bus­tled in a few min­utes late, sat down, and pulled out a small note­book filled with an inde­ci­pher­able scrawl.

    “Joss Whe­don,” Hoff­man said, refer­ring to the film and tele­vi­sion direc­tor who spe­cial­izes in mate­r­i­al about vam­pires and com­ic-book char­ac­ters. “Is he some­body you think is cool and fun? No? I’m inter­view­ing him on Wednes­day.”

    “I have a recruit­ing din­ner,” Pin­cus said. “Actu­al­ly a re-recruit­ing din­ner.” He is a forty-nine-year-old triath­lete, small and lithe, with a long flop of hair. He was wear­ing a T‑shirt, jeans, and sneak­ers.

    Hoff­man shrugged. “Any­thing top of mind? ’Cause I have a list.” Hoff­man tries to begin all meals with a rit­u­al in which both par­ties write down a list of the top­ics they want to dis­cuss.

    “I made a con­nec­tion between the things we were talk­ing about with the Pres­i­dent and the Sum­mer of Love,” Pin­cus said.

    Dur­ing Pres­i­dent Obama’s reëlec­tion cam­paign, in 2012, Hoff­man and Pin­cus each gave a mil­lion dol­lars to Pri­or­i­ties USA, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Super PAC. Since then, they have had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to spend time with Oba­ma. In a pri­vate forty-five-minute meet­ing in the Oval Office in 2012, Pin­cus gave the Pres­i­dent a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion on what he calls “the prod­uct-man­age­ment approach to gov­ern­ment.” Oba­ma tele­phones him now and then, some­times at home, and Pin­cus and his wife have been Obama’s din­ner guests.

    In June, Hoff­man helped orga­nize the guest list for a din­ner par­ty for Oba­ma in San Fran­cis­co, and he has had con­ver­sa­tions with Oba­ma at sev­er­al meet­ings and din­ners at the White House. One was for a small group that includ­ed Toni Mor­ri­son and the actress Eva Lon­go­ria, con­vened to give Oba­ma advice about his post-Pres­i­den­cy. Hoff­man and his wife, Michelle Yee, also attend­ed the state din­ner in late Sep­tem­ber for Xi Jin­ping, the Pres­i­dent of Chi­na.

    LinkedIn has pro­vid­ed the White House with some of the trove of data it has col­lect­ed about its users’ activ­i­ties in the job mar­ket; the data have been used in the annu­al Eco­nom­ic Report of the Pres­i­dent. Ear­li­er this year, a for­mer LinkedIn exec­u­tive, DJ Patil, was named to the new posi­tion of chief data sci­en­tist in the White House. In July, Hoff­man orga­nized a meet­ing for peo­ple involved with Obama’s new foun­da­tion on how to bet­ter har­ness the pow­er of social net­works. His list for din­ner with Pin­cus includ­ed the ques­tion of what to dis­cuss at that meet­ing.

    The close rela­tion­ship between Hoff­man and the White House isn’t just about his being a major polit­i­cal donor. He and oth­ers like him have some­thing more pow­er­ful than mon­ey to offer: a way for offi­cials to con­nect with the largest pos­si­ble audi­ences. In the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, the boss­es of polit­i­cal machines served this role; in the twen­ti­eth, it was media barons, espe­cial­ly in broad­cast­ing and news­pa­pers; in the twen­ty-first, it is peo­ple who have cre­at­ed vast online social net­works.

    This year’s Super Bowl attract­ed the biggest audi­ence in the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can net­work television—a hun­dred and four­teen mil­lion peo­ple. That rep­re­sents an annu­al peak in the life of a declin­ing medi­um. The three tra­di­tion­al evening broad­cast news pro­grams togeth­er draw twen­ty-two mil­lion view­ers. Every day, a hun­dred and six­ty-four mil­lion peo­ple in the U.S. and Cana­da, and up to a bil­lion peo­ple world­wide, are active on Face­book.

    Oba­ma has said that he wants to encour­age civic engage­ment after he leaves the White House. Sil­i­con Val­ley can pro­vide pow­er­ful tools to accom­plish that. The same cal­cu­lus draws peo­ple from Hol­ly­wood, such as Joss Whe­don, on reg­u­lar pil­grim­ages north to meet with Hoff­man and oth­ers. And it’s why, when the launch of the HealthCare.gov Web site failed spec­tac­u­lar­ly in the fall of 2013, the White House’s chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer (a friend of Hoffman’s) hired a team of Sil­i­con Val­ley exec­u­tives to help fix it.

    In pol­i­tics as in the rest of life, rela­tion­ships move in two direc­tions. Along with what­ev­er help Oba­ma gets in Sil­i­con Val­ley, he will absorb some of its view of the world. In that view, human­i­ty is a kind of Prometheus bound by a con­strict­ing web of old insti­tu­tion­al arrange­ments that the Inter­net must clear away. Reid Hoff­man and his friends have got very skill­ful at pol­i­tics, nation­al­ly and glob­al­ly, and their ideas have a good chance of being imple­ment­ed.

    “Why don’t we start with the Sum­mer of Love?” Hoff­man said.

    Pin­cus shook his head. “No, let’s start with your list.”

    Hoff­man ticked off a few items: An upper-lev­el under­grad­u­ate com­put­er-sci­ence class he’s teach­ing at Stan­ford called “Tech­nol­o­gy-Enabled Blitzs­cal­ing.” Twitch, an online video plat­form for gamers. His recent meet­ings with George Osborne, the Chan­celler of the Exche­quer of the Unit­ed King­dom; Ban Ki-moon, the Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al of the Unit­ed Nations; the Duke of York; and the min­is­ter of cab­i­net affairs of the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates. How Hoff­man and Pin­cus man­age their wealth. (Hoff­man is worth between three and four bil­lion dol­lars, which puts him between twen­ti­eth and thir­ti­eth place on the list of Sil­i­con Valley’s rich­est peo­ple.)

    “Oh, and one more,” he said. “Are you stack­ing A.I. at all?”

    “I got that book ‘Super­in­tel­li­gence,’ ” Pin­cus said.

    “I’ve actu­al­ly decid­ed it’s worth going deep on,” Hoff­man said.

    They fin­ished the items on Hoffman’s list. “So let’s go to the Pres­i­dent,” Hoff­man said. “Start with my view or your view?”

    “He’s com­ing back to his strength, being an ora­tor to the peo­ple,” Pin­cus said. “When I had my one-on-one with him, I said, ‘Where’s Preach­er Oba­ma? And Oba­ma the fight­er? Scrap­py with Con­gress, in the fray.’ When he’s Preach­er Oba­ma, he goes back to that J.F.K. place. My favorite moment was at the end, when he said, ‘Unless we solve gov­er­nance, you’re not going to have the impact you want to have.’ ”

    They talked for a while about ways the polit­i­cal sys­tem might be fixed through online activism. Last year, Hoff­man con­tributed a mil­lion dol­lars to May­day, the crowd­fund­ed Super Pac found­ed by Lawrence Lessig, the Har­vard law pro­fes­sor who is now run­ning for Pres­i­dent. May­day is designed to end all Super PACs, remov­ing big mon­ey from pol­i­tics.

    Pin­cus had one idea he was espe­cial­ly excit­ed about. “In this elec­tion, we’d want a mil­lion peo­ple to raise one bil­lion dol­lars to run Mike Bloomberg for Pres­i­dent,” he said. Pin­cus and Hoff­man know and admire Bloomberg. “Through Kick­starter. Say the min­i­mum is five hun­dred mil­lion. I think he’d be the best. It’d be pret­ty cool. That would change pol­i­tics for­ev­er.”

    He tight­ened his body into a coil and leaned toward Hoff­man. “Why couldn’t that hap­pen? A mil­lion peo­ple, buy­ing the Pres­i­den­cy. Look at Star Cit­i­zen,” he said, refer­ring to an upcom­ing online mul­ti­play­er sim­u­la­tion game about the gov­er­nance of the Unit­ed Empire of Earth in the thir­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Through crowd­fund­ing appeals, Star Cit­i­zen has brought in some eighty mil­lion dol­lars to finance fur­ther game devel­op­ment.

    “It’s a game that runs for two years, they have a hun­dred mil­lion users a year, two to three hun­dred thou­sand a day. Peo­ple are pas­sion­ate about the game, and the guy who does it”—Chris Roberts—“is a star. If you can do that, why can’t peo­ple buy the Pres­i­den­cy?” He meant mod­est vol­un­tary con­trib­u­tors, not big-mon­ey donors like Hoff­man and him. “A mil­lion peo­ple give a thou­sand dol­lars apiece. I believe there’s a mil­lion peo­ple who’d like to give a ‘fu ck you’ to both polit­i­cal par­ties.”

    Hoff­man often finds him­self pro­vid­ing a real­i­ty check to his wild-eyed friends. “I think Bloomberg had his peo­ple look at it,” he said, mean­ing that Bloomberg had thought about run­ning and decid­ed not to. But Pin­cus wasn’t con­vinced.

    “He’s not sev­en­ty-per-cent sure he’d win,” Pin­cus said. “If he thought he’d win, he’d run. If he knew this would work, he’d do it. The media atten­tion would be so mas­sive! I think he’s, like, shy. Maybe a lit­tle risk-averse. He’s the oppo­site of Trump.”

    “To some extent, that’s what hap­pened with Oba­ma,” Hoff­man said. Think­ing about how sud­den­ly the Oba­ma cam­paign had tak­en off in 2007 and 2008, he was warm­ing up to the idea.

    “I start with ‘What’s a fun sto­ry?’ ” Pin­cus said. “And fun sto­ries wind up with mon­ey. Wouldn’t it be cool? And wouldn’t it change pol­i­tics for­ev­er?”

    Hoffman’s din­ners gain alti­tude and veloc­i­ty as they go on. It’s not about the food and drink. He is on a per­pet­u­al diet and seems bare­ly to notice what is put before him. The con­ver­sa­tion pro­vides the stim­u­lus: the grander the ideas, the more vol­u­ble he becomes.

    It was time to get to Pincus’s list. “Sum­mer of Love,” Hoff­man said.

    “Sum­mer of Love. Should I remind you of the con­cept? The idea is that, in 2017, it’s the fifti­eth anniver­sary of the orig­i­nal Sum­mer of Love in San Fran­cis­co. Can we use that to gen­er­ate a year-long sum­mer of ser­vice?” Pin­cus explained that a series of rock con­certs might be orga­nized, offer­ing tick­ets com­pet­i­tive­ly through a new app. “Start in San Fran­cis­co. It could be gam­i­fied civic engage­ment. It’s a dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tive for tech. It’s not the nar­ra­tive that’s been writ­ten for us. It’s dis­rup­tion on an estab­lish­ment lev­el, not a tech lev­el. I spoke to Bono about it, and he went nuts!”

    “I’ll give it more thought,” Hoff­man said.

    “It’d be inter­est­ing to see what Oba­ma thinks about it.”

    “For sure. We’ll add that to the July meet­ing.”

    Every­thing about Reid Hoffman—his busi­ness, his polit­i­cal activ­i­ties, his phil­an­thropy, and his social life—is based on a premise about how the eco­nom­ic world will work from now on. In the decades imme­di­ate­ly after the Sec­ond World War, peo­ple thought about the econ­o­my in terms of cor­po­ra­tions, gov­ern­ment agen­cies, labor unions, and so on; mid­dle-class Amer­i­cans often aspired to a life spent at a big orga­ni­za­tion that offered job secu­ri­ty, health care, and a pen­sion. Begin­ning in the mid-nine­teen-sev­en­ties, this social order fell apart, as eco­nom­ic life became much more uncer­tain and more favor­able to Wall Street than to Main Street. The idea that com­pa­nies should be run pri­mar­i­ly to keep their stock price as high as pos­si­ble came to the fore, the goal of life­time employ­ment fad­ed, and bright peo­ple who want­ed busi­ness careers were more attract­ed to finance than to indus­try. It was at this time that the growth of mid­dle-class incomes began to slow, and inequal­i­ty began to increase.

    Hoff­man is con­vinced that we can fix the prob­lem through Inter­net-enabled net­works. Work is already becom­ing more tem­po­rary, spo­radic, and infor­mal, and this change should be embraced. Many more peo­ple will become entre­pre­neur­ial, if not entre­pre­neurs. The keep­er of your career will be not your employ­er but your per­son­al network—so you’d bet­ter put a lot of effort into mak­ing it as exten­sive and as vital as pos­si­ble. A twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry ver­sion of William H. Whyte’s mem­o­rably titled 1956 book “The Orga­ni­za­tion Man” would, by Hoffman’s log­ic, be called “The Net­work Man,” and this vir­tu­al struc­ture would define the age as ful­ly as the big cor­po­ra­tion defined the ear­li­er age.

    LinkedIn, which has more than three hun­dred and eighty mil­lion mem­bers, is meant to be the enabling device for the emerg­ing era. Although out­siders tend to see the com­pa­ny as an inex­haustible source of nui­sance e‑mails, its mem­bers con­stant­ly bulk up their per­son­al net­works and post new mate­r­i­al to their pro­files, to be ready for the next job switch. Still, Sil­i­con Val­ley is obsessed with “scale,” and LinkedIn is, as yet, insuf­fi­cient­ly enor­mous.

    Last year, Jeff Wein­er, Hoffman’s suc­ces­sor as C.E.O., announced a plan to have LinkedIn cre­ate some­thing he calls “the eco­nom­ic graph,” which would track all employ­ment activ­i­ty in the world, for the 3.3 bil­lion peo­ple who work, with LinkedIn as the plat­form.

    “The vision is to cre­ate eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ty for every­one on the globe,” Wein­er, a small, pep­py, beard­ed man of forty-five, told me when I vis­it­ed him in his office. “We’ve built the infra­struc­ture. It’s not fan­ta­sy.” LinkedIn would be a pur­vey­or of edu­ca­tion, in the form of online skill-build­ing cours­es; Hoff­man recent­ly pub­lished an essay called “Dis­rupt­ing the Diplo­ma,” in which he argued that, in the future, peo­ple won’t think of high­er edu­ca­tion only as get­ting degrees from uni­ver­si­ties. (In April, LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com, the online edu­ca­tion com­pa­ny.)

    LinkedIn would also pur­vey busi­ness advice. Three years ago, it assem­bled a group of eight hun­dred “influencers”—Hoffman, Bill Gates, Deep­ak Chopra, Ari­an­na Huffington—who began reg­u­lar­ly post­ing on the LinkedIn site. (Count­ing the work of less rar­efied fig­ures, LinkedIn posts at least five hun­dred thou­sand new pieces of writ­ing a month.) It would list every job every­where and pro­vide a pro­file for every mem­ber of the glob­al work­force, includ­ing blue-col­lar work­ers. Every time you changed jobs or need­ed to acquire a new skill, you would use LinkedIn.

    The wall of Hoffman’s office, along with pho­tographs of him with Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clin­ton, and Barack Oba­ma, con­tains a framed “net­work graph,” pro­duced by the company’s data-ana­lyt­ics team, show­ing all the con­nec­tions he makes to oth­er peo­ple through LinkedIn. It’s a dia­gram of thou­sands of col­or-cod­ed lines link­ing nodes on the net­work, with Hoff­man at the center—by far the most dense­ly con­nect­ed node.

    Hoff­man has an uncan­ny abil­i­ty to move seam­less­ly among the worlds of tech­nol­o­gy, invest­ing, and pol­i­tics and the worlds of games, sci­ence fic­tion, and comics. “Busi­ness is the sys­tem­at­ic play­ing of games,” he says. He seems to con­ceive of him­self as a self-invent­ed super­hero: the Ubern­ode, the world’s most net­worked per­son. He isn’t just anoth­er con­ven­tion­al net­work­er or anoth­er greedy Sil­i­con Val­ley prick. His project is to build a bet­ter world, whose out­lines are much clear­er to him than to most peo­ple.

    Although he has become one of the infor­mal rulers of the place he inhab­its, the Ubern­ode is deter­mined to be a kind of reverse exem­plar of its cul­ture. He and his wife live in a four-bed­room house in Palo Alto; he doesn’t own a pri­vate plane (though he some­times rents one) or a vast rur­al estate; and his only obvi­ous lux­u­ry, a Tes­la, is a recent acqui­si­tion. He devotes much of his time to con­duct­ing God­fa­ther-like meet­ings with friends, employ­ees, tech aspi­rants, vis­it­ing dig­ni­taries, and do-good­ers who want advice or a favor. At some point, he will gen­tly ask, “How can I be help­ful?” All his activ­i­ties are in the ser­vice of the same cause: to make it pos­si­ble for more peo­ple to oper­ate the way he does.

    Hoff­man likes to ask peo­ple, “Who’s in your tribe?” His tribe is entre­pre­neurs. Nan­cy Lublin, a “social entre­pre­neur” in New York (DoSomething.org, Cri­sis Text Line), says, “Reid intro­duced me to a dif­fer­ent world, where for the first time I felt nor­mal. This thing chose me. This thing chose Reid. I think our reli­gion is entre­pre­neur­ship.” Hoff­man calls him­self “a mys­ti­cal athe­ist,” but he says that he is “deeply engaged in reli­gious ques­tions.” The world he has cre­at­ed around him­self has elab­o­rate cus­toms and rit­u­als, and it has some­thing to say about every part of life and every major issue. Not long ago, Hoff­man worked with a brand­ing com­pa­ny to devise a sys­tem of twen­ty-eight images—they look like the pet­ro­glyphs at ancient Native Amer­i­can sites in the West—one for each essen­tial human virtue and one for Hoffman’s ini­tials. Hoff­man shares the mean­ing of the images with mem­bers of his tribe.

    ...

    The mis­eries of Hoffman’s ear­ly life end­ed when he got to Stan­ford, in 1989. He enrolled in a new major called Sym­bol­ic Sys­tems, a com­bi­na­tion of phi­los­o­phy, lin­guis­tics, psy­chol­o­gy, and com­put­er sci­ence. He met Michelle Yee in his fresh­man year. He also became close to Peter Thiel, the Sil­i­con Val­ley provo­ca­teur who spe­cial­izes in start­ing com­pa­nies and mak­ing impolitic pub­lic state­ments. He has come to embody the lib­er­tar­i­an­ism that per­me­ates much of Sil­i­con Val­ley. They both won seats on Stanford’s stu­dent sen­ate, with Hoff­man as the left-winger and Thiel as the right-winger.

    Hoff­man decid­ed to become a philoso­pher or a pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al, a term he likes to use. But after study­ing for three years at Oxford, on a Mar­shall schol­ar­ship, he decid­ed against an aca­d­e­m­ic career. His pro­fes­sors spent their time think­ing about high­ly spe­cif­ic prob­lems and pub­lish­ing for an audi­ence of their peers. Hoffman’s ambi­tions were almost dia­met­ri­cal­ly opposed to that kind of think­ing.

    In the ear­ly nineties, when Hoff­man returned from Oxford, he and Thiel spent a week­end at Hoffman’s grand­par­ents’ house, in Men­do­ci­no Coun­ty, talk­ing about what they were going to do with their lives. Thiel told me that Hoff­man was entranced by “Snow Crash,” a sci­ence-fic­tion nov­el by Neal Stephen­son, pub­lished in 1992, which takes place in a twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry Cal­i­for­nia where gov­ern­ment has col­lapsed and peo­ple cre­ate avatars and try to find a new way to live through a tech­nol­o­gy-based vir­tu­al soci­ety called the Meta­verse.

    The term “Inter­net” was not yet in gen­er­al cir­cu­la­tion, and “social net­work” was an aca­d­e­m­ic con­cept that psy­chol­o­gists and soci­ol­o­gists used to derive math­e­mat­i­cal for­mu­las that explained people’s pat­terns of friend­ships. But Hoff­man was play­ing with a set of ingre­di­ents that he had first explored at Stan­ford, with Thiel and others—fantasy gam­ing, com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy, philosophy—and think­ing about whether there was a big idea that could enable him to have a major effect on the world, first through a busi­ness and then through the cre­ation of an entire social sys­tem.

    His first job was at a short-lived online ser­vice at Apple called eWorld. Then he worked at World­s­Away, a “vir­tu­al chat” com­mu­ni­ty, owned by Fujit­su, where users inter­act­ed through fic­tion­al­ized graph­ic rep­re­sen­ta­tions of them­selves. In 1997, Hoff­man start­ed his own com­pa­ny, called Social­Net, which cre­at­ed a way for peo­ple to con­nect with each oth­er for var­i­ous pur­pos­es, main­ly dat­ing, using pseu­do­nyms.

    Social­Net was soon acquired for a mod­est sum by a com­pa­ny called Spark Net­works, which now owns the reli­gious dat­ing sites JDate and Chris­tian­Min­gle. Hoff­man and his friends had failed to real­ize that the most suc­cess­ful online net­works would get peo­ple to use their real names. But in start­ing online soft­ware busi­ness­es based on the idea of con­nect­ing peo­ple, they had arrived at a key per­cep­tion about the Inter­net.

    Most tra­di­tion­al com­pa­nies thought of the new medi­um as a poten­tial­ly mirac­u­lous, and cheap, way to broad­cast their prod­ucts to much larg­er audi­ences. Peo­ple like Hoff­man, Pin­cus, and Thiel saw it as a way to, as Hoff­man puts it, “con­fig­ure the space in which peo­ple would inter­act” on their own: the anal­o­gy was more to the tele­phone than to tele­vi­sion or radio. The mem­bers of the net­work would decide what infor­ma­tion it car­ried, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion would run between mem­bers, not from the cen­ter to the mem­bers. This was the the­o­ry; along with it went a super-aggres­sive mode of busi­ness behav­ior. The rob­ber barons of the late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry often asso­ci­at­ed their dri­ve to pow­er with reli­gious piety or with Darwin’s the­o­ry of nat­ur­al selec­tion. The equiv­a­lent for Inter­net entre­pre­neurs is a rhetoric of fight­ing estab­lished inter­ests on behalf of ordi­nary peo­ple. Pin­cus coined the phrase “rev­o­lu­tion of the ants” to describe what he and his friends believed they were foment­ing.

    Sarnoff’s law, a twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry broad­cast­ing max­im named after the founder of NBC, holds that the val­ue of a net­work ris­es and falls in lock­step with audi­ence size. Sil­i­con Valley’s ver­sion is Metcalfe’s law, named after one of the inven­tors of Eth­er­net, a piv­otal tech­nol­o­gy for com­put­er-to-com­put­er con­tact. The law says that the val­ue of a net­work grows expo­nen­tial­ly with the num­ber of its users. (Hoff­man prefers the word “super­lin­ear” to indi­cate that some peo­ple in a net­work are much more con­nect­ed than oth­ers.) His generation’s the­o­ry of the Inter­net means that you can get much big­ger, much faster, with­out cre­at­ing a con­ven­tion­al prod­uct at all.

    ...

    Hoff­man spends every Mon­day at Grey­lock, the Sil­i­con Val­ley ven­ture-cap­i­tal firm, where he is one of a small group of part­ners. Greylock’s head­quar­ters are on Sand Hill Road, the Via Imperii of tech­nol­o­gy invest­ing, close to the Stan­ford cam­pus. LinkedIn, where Hoff­man occu­pies anoth­er office for much of the week, has a six-build­ing cam­pus in the indus­tri­al flats of Moun­tain View, a few miles to the east, right next to Google’s.

    His two jobs, his relent­less round of break­fasts and din­ners, his reg­u­lar for­ays into the hip­per north branch of Sil­i­con Val­ley in San Fran­cis­co, and a great deal of trav­el put him at the nexus of the tech­nol­o­gy cul­ture. As he once remarked to a vis­i­tor, “More or less, if there’s any­thing in the Val­ley I’m going to know about it.” One day when I was at Grey­lock, Bill Gates dropped by for a few hours to hear about the company’s port­fo­lio. Grey­lock was an ear­ly investor in Face­book, and Mark Zucker­berg now invests part of his for­tune with Grey­lock.

    ...

    The mas­ter con­struct in Hoffman’s world is allo­cat­ing cap­i­tal to oth­er entrepreneurs—a cat­e­go­ry that includes politi­cians (Sen­a­tor Cory Book­er, of New Jer­sey, is a favorite), peo­ple start­ing busi­ness­es, and founders of non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tions whom Hoff­man con­sid­ers to be mem­bers of his tribe. He told me that in Sil­i­con Val­ley pres­tige is not espe­cial­ly impor­tant, which means that there is an assumed equiv­a­lence between numer­i­cal­ly mea­sur­able per­for­mance and social val­ue.

    Tech­nol­o­gy invest­ing, espe­cial­ly at this moment, rep­re­sents a high­ly spe­cial­ized form of hyper­cap­i­tal­ism. In the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies, busi­ness­es need­ed invest­ment cap­i­tal in order to build fac­to­ries and stores and to acquire equip­ment and inven­to­ry. Only then could they begin to make mon­ey. Inter­net star­tups don’t require much in the way of phys­i­cal assets beyond office space, and they can have glob­al reach instan­ta­neous­ly.

    It’s the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble to make almost unimag­in­able amounts of mon­ey very quick­ly, on rel­a­tive­ly small invest­ments. Last year, Face­book bought What­sApp for nine­teen bil­lion dol­lars, when it was less than five years old, with fifty-five employ­ees and min­i­mal rev­enues. The acqui­si­tion brought WhatsApp’s orig­i­nal ven­ture fun­der a six­ty-to-one return on its invest­ment. Grey­lock was an ear­ly investor in Insta­gram, which sold to Face­book for a bil­lion dol­lars in 2012, when it had only thir­teen employ­ees.

    Even in this age of inequal­i­ty, there’s noth­ing as unequal as the dis­tri­b­u­tion of suc­cess in Sil­i­con Val­ley. One of Hoffman’s ven­ture-cap­i­tal friends, Mike Maples, Jr., esti­mates that of the rough­ly thir­ty thou­sand tech star­tups a year, only ten will wind up rep­re­sent­ing nine­ty-sev­en per cent of the total val­ue of all of them, and one will rep­re­sent as much val­ue as all the oth­ers com­bined.

    A rig­or­ous study of twen­ty years’ worth of Sil­i­con Val­ley star­tups by two economists—Robert Hall, of Stan­ford, and Susan Wood­ward, of Sand Hill Econometrics—found that almost three-quar­ters of com­pa­ny founders who get ven­ture fund­ing (a cat­e­go­ry that rep­re­sents only a small minor­i­ty of those who try to get ven­ture fund­ing) wind up mak­ing noth­ing. Ven­ture cap­i­tal is over­whelm­ing­ly ori­ent­ed toward speed, big ideas, and the quest for the obses­sive, super-smart, rule-break­ing entre­pre­neur-hero.

    There is some aes­thet­ic vari­a­tion with­in Sil­i­con Valley—Sand Hill Road offices have hard­wood floors and cor­po­rate art on the walls, San Fran­cis­co offices have exposed-brick walls and open workspaces—but every­body is intense, casu­al, sleep-deprived, and pre­oc­cu­pied with launch­es of com­pa­nies and prod­ucts. Meet­ings at Grey­lock have a sup­pressed feroc­i­ty, as if there were a com­pe­ti­tion for who among the part­ners comes across as the most low-key.

    ...

    Because Sil­i­con Val­ley jobs don’t car­ry with them twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry expec­ta­tions about secu­ri­ty and ben­e­fits, employ­ers com­pen­sate peo­ple as much as pos­si­ble with stock, so that they think of them­selves as own­ers rather than employ­ees. It’s assumed that what every­body real­ly wants is to quit and cre­ate a start­up, and, for those who aren’t in tech, the future as imag­ined in Sil­i­con Val­ley may not entail full-time employ­ment at all. Instead, peo­ple would assem­ble their eco­nom­ic lives through ele­ments pro­vid­ed by online mar­ket­place com­pa­nies from Sil­i­con Val­ley: a lit­tle Uber dri­ving here, a lit­tle TaskRab­bit­ing there.

    If you grant Hoffman’s premise that the net­worked econ­o­my is the new mod­el, you can view its advent with excite­ment or with unease. Hoff­man likes to cite a sta­tis­tic from a Unit­ed Nations paper on sus­tain­able devel­op­ment goals: the glob­al econ­o­my will need six hun­dred mil­lion new jobs over the next twen­ty years, and exist­ing busi­ness can pro­vide only ten to twen­ty mil­lion of them. The rest, he claims, will have to come from star­tups, so soci­eties every­where will have to reori­ent them­selves sig­nif­i­cant­ly in order to make entre­pre­neur­ship eas­i­er.

    That is the object of all Hoffman’s polit­i­cal and phil­an­thropic activ­i­ty. As he told one vis­i­tor, “I’m try­ing to get politi­cians to under­stand that solv­ing this prob­lem is about facil­i­ta­tion of a net­work, as opposed to”—sarcastically—“the New Deal.” He has a soar­ing opti­mism in the pow­er of his mod­el to make life bet­ter for every­body, and believes that the pre-Inter­net arrange­ments can’t do that. He told me that he has con­clud­ed over the past year that the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal par­ties are too entrenched to solve the country’s prob­lems, so he’s unlike­ly, in this elec­tion cycle, to be mak­ing anoth­er big con­tri­bu­tion to Pri­or­i­ties USA, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Super PAC he sup­port­ed in 2012. (Thus far, among the Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, he has had pri­vate meet­ings with Hillary Clin­ton and Jeb Bush, but has not made up his mind whom to sup­port for Pres­i­dent.) What he’s try­ing to achieve, he says, is “mas­sive, out­size, dis­con­tin­u­ous impact.”

    Not every­one in Sil­i­con Val­ley is as san­guine about the tech­nol­o­gy-enabled eco­nom­ic rev­o­lu­tion. There is an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion about the uncer­tain eco­nom­ic future for mid­dle-class and work­ing-class Amer­i­cans who don’t have tech­nol­o­gy skills. Joe Kraus, an old friend of Hoffman’s who works for Google’s ven­ture-cap­i­tal divi­sion, told me, “My instinct is that cre­at­ing the val­ley else­where hasn’t been suc­cess­ful. It would be pre­sump­tu­ous to say, ‘Of course it will work else­where.’ I just don’t know.”

    John Lil­ly, one of Hoffman’s part­ners at Grey­lock, was open­ly pes­simistic: “I’m more lefty than your typ­i­cal Sil­i­con Val­ley guy. I believe actions have con­se­quences, and shit like that. Clear­ly, wealth is becom­ing more con­cen­trat­ed, and the net­work takes a larg­er and larg­er share.” He sus­pects that the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry was an anom­aly. “There was no mid­dle class, then there was a mid­dle class, now we’re back where we started—it’s hol­lowed out. I don’t see where the mid­dle class is going to come from. You’ll start see­ing more con­ver­sa­tion about a guar­an­teed income. Right now, there’s an absolute belief that mar­kets can solve everything—software can.”

    Even Mike Maples, who describes him­self as some­one who believes in “free peo­ple and the free mar­ket,” told me that when he went to Dal­las to talk to Glenn Beck, the con­ser­v­a­tive talk-show host, he was sur­prised to find that Beck was con­cerned about how his audi­ence would be affect­ed by the eco­nom­ic future that Maples was describ­ing. “He said, ‘What do you say to a guy like me? How do you answer the argu­ment that there are forty mil­lion peo­ple in red states who are going to get dis­placed?’ ”

    Hoffman’s new world of online plat­forms, mar­ket­places, and net­works pro­duces com­pa­nies that emerge from the bru­tal com­pe­ti­tion among star­tups as big top-down orga­ni­za­tions with qua­si-monop­oly sta­tus: Ama­zon in retail­ing, Face­book in social net­work­ing, Google in search, LinkedIn in busi­ness net­work­ing. Once net­work effects real­ly kick in, they cre­ate a pow­er­ful bar­ri­er to entry for poten­tial rivals: the more effort you’ve put into your iden­ti­ty on Face­book or LinkedIn or YouTube, the more dif­fi­cult it becomes for you to switch to a com­peti­tor. One of Peter Thiel’s favorite bad-boy notions is that com­pe­ti­tion is “antipo­dal to cap­i­tal­ism”: once a com­pa­ny becomes suc­cess­ful, it should try to estab­lish a monop­oly posi­tion, so that it can charge the kind of prices and make the kind of prof­its that are avail­able only to com­pa­nies with­out mean­ing­ful com­peti­tors.

    Per­haps one class of peo­ple will live inside big com­pa­nies, and a larg­er class will be part of a loos­er net­worked com­mu­ni­ty. The more sin­cere­ly you believe that a bet­ter world is emerg­ing from this process—a world of rapid improve­ment in the lives of bil­lions of people—the more whole­heart­ed­ly you can work to has­ten its advent. It’s hard to imag­ine that there could be a truer believ­er than Reid Hoff­man.

    ...

    It was the end of a long day of meet­ings at LinkedIn—philanthropy, prod­uct reviews, a vis­i­tor from Hollywood—but Hoff­man had lit on a scal­able top­ic. His arms rose above his head, as if pulled by invis­i­ble wires. “Is what we can cre­ate an eth­i­cal sys­tem, or a sys­tem that doesn’t con­tra­vene humans? There will be some peo­ple who think whatever’s right is to let the next step in evo­lu­tion play out. That’s a scary thought.”

    “There’s a nonze­ro chance that A.I. will be smarter than humans,” Manyi­ka said.

    “Isn’t that one hun­dred per cent? Isn’t it just a time coef­fi­cient? If we sur­vive at all. Nobody knowl­edge­able thinks it’s zero. Every­one knows it’s ten to a hun­dred years.”

    “There are peo­ple look­ing at this,” Manyi­ka said. He and Hoff­man were hop­ing that this was the kind of issue that might engage Pope Fran­cis.

    It was time for the next item on Manyika’s list: “Jobs. Mid­dle class.” Manyi­ka was one of a ros­ter of peo­ple, includ­ing five Nobel Prize-win­ning econ­o­mists, who, in June, had signed a state­ment called “Open Let­ter on the Dig­i­tal Econ­o­my,” which called atten­tion to the prob­lem of dra­mat­ic tech­no­log­i­cal advances and stag­nant growth in income or wages for most Amer­i­cans. The let­ter called for an ambi­tious pro­gram of new research and changes in the poli­cies of gov­ern­ment and busi­ness.

    Although Hoff­man usu­al­ly likes being asso­ci­at­ed with big lib­er­al-mind­ed reformist efforts, he had not signed the let­ter. “My LinkedIn team was hes­i­tant,” he said, a lit­tle apolo­get­i­cal­ly.

    “Eric didn’t sign, either,” Manyi­ka said.

    “I agree with the thrust of it. We should do some­thing.”

    Manyi­ka under­stood that not every chief exec­u­tive in Sil­i­con Val­ley could sign the state­ment, but he was gen­tly try­ing to pull Hoff­man to the left, and he knew how to frame the argu­ment so that it would appeal to him. He went on, “We can­not ignore this prob­lem. Right now, everybody’s punt­ing. We know the share of income that goes to wages is a declin­ing por­tion, com­pared with cap­i­tal expen­di­tures. What does that mean for jobs? Entre­pre­neur­ship is part of the answer. Mass-scale entre­pre­neur­ship. Before you even get to A.I.”

    “You have to be able to let peo­ple adapt,” Hoff­man said. “You have to have cheap resources to put across the whole sys­tem. How do you get inclu­sion with­in the tech ecosys­tem?”

    “Very few of the pro­grams have scale,” Manyi­ka said.

    “You have to scale to infi­nite,” Hoff­man said. ?

    Ok, that’s a lot to unpack, but based on the fol­low­ing, it sounds like Reid Hoff­man wants to turn LinkedIn into a giant glob­al jobs-post­ing board that we’ll all use to find work as we move out of the era of the “The Orga­ni­za­tion Man” and into the age of “The Net­work Man” where every­one becomes an entre­pre­neur in the busi­ness of sell­ing their ser­vices in an Uber-like piece­meal man­ner. And Uber-izing the econ­o­my should some­how address the issues that have emerged in the mid-sev­en­ties as eco­nom­ic life become much more uncer­tain for the mid­dle-class and for more favor­able to wealthy inter­ests. And LinkedIn is cre­at­ing an “eco­nom­ic graph” with the goal of cre­at­ing “oppor­tu­ni­ty for every­one on the globe” via sell­ing their ser­vices via Linked­In’s net­work­ing ser­vices:

    ...
    Every­thing about Reid Hoffman—his busi­ness, his polit­i­cal activ­i­ties, his phil­an­thropy, and his social life—is based on a premise about how the eco­nom­ic world will work from now on. In the decades imme­di­ate­ly after the Sec­ond World War, peo­ple thought about the econ­o­my in terms of cor­po­ra­tions, gov­ern­ment agen­cies, labor unions, and so on; mid­dle-class Amer­i­cans often aspired to a life spent at a big orga­ni­za­tion that offered job secu­ri­ty, health care, and a pen­sion. Begin­ning in the mid-nine­teen-sev­en­ties, this social order fell apart, as eco­nom­ic life became much more uncer­tain and more favor­able to Wall Street than to Main Street. The idea that com­pa­nies should be run pri­mar­i­ly to keep their stock price as high as pos­si­ble came to the fore, the goal of life­time employ­ment fad­ed, and bright peo­ple who want­ed busi­ness careers were more attract­ed to finance than to indus­try. It was at this time that the growth of mid­dle-class incomes began to slow, and inequal­i­ty began to increase.

    Hoff­man is con­vinced that we can fix the prob­lem through Inter­net-enabled net­works. Work is already becom­ing more tem­po­rary, spo­radic, and infor­mal, and this change should be embraced. Many more peo­ple will become entre­pre­neur­ial, if not entre­pre­neurs. The keep­er of your career will be not your employ­er but your per­son­al network—so you’d bet­ter put a lot of effort into mak­ing it as exten­sive and as vital as pos­si­ble. A twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry ver­sion of William H. Whyte’s mem­o­rably titled 1956 book “The Orga­ni­za­tion Man” would, by Hoffman’s log­ic, be called “The Net­work Man,” and this vir­tu­al struc­ture would define the age as ful­ly as the big cor­po­ra­tion defined the ear­li­er age.

    LinkedIn, which has more than three hun­dred and eighty mil­lion mem­bers, is meant to be the enabling device for the emerg­ing era. Although out­siders tend to see the com­pa­ny as an inex­haustible source of nui­sance e‑mails, its mem­bers con­stant­ly bulk up their per­son­al net­works and post new mate­r­i­al to their pro­files, to be ready for the next job switch. Still, Sil­i­con Val­ley is obsessed with “scale,” and LinkedIn is, as yet, insuf­fi­cient­ly enor­mous.

    Last year, Jeff Wein­er, Hoffman’s suc­ces­sor as C.E.O., announced a plan to have LinkedIn cre­ate some­thing he calls “the eco­nom­ic graph,” which would track all employ­ment activ­i­ty in the world, for the 3.3 bil­lion peo­ple who work, with LinkedIn as the plat­form.

    “The vision is to cre­ate eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ty for every­one on the globe,” Wein­er, a small, pep­py, beard­ed man of forty-five, told me when I vis­it­ed him in his office. “We’ve built the infra­struc­ture. It’s not fan­ta­sy.” LinkedIn would be a pur­vey­or of edu­ca­tion, in the form of online skill-build­ing cours­es; Hoff­man recent­ly pub­lished an essay called “Dis­rupt­ing the Diplo­ma,” in which he argued that, in the future, peo­ple won’t think of high­er edu­ca­tion only as get­ting degrees from uni­ver­si­ties. (In April, LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com, the online edu­ca­tion com­pa­ny.)

    LinkedIn would also pur­vey busi­ness advice. Three years ago, it assem­bled a group of eight hun­dred “influencers”—Hoffman, Bill Gates, Deep­ak Chopra, Ari­an­na Huffington—who began reg­u­lar­ly post­ing on the LinkedIn site. (Count­ing the work of less rar­efied fig­ures, LinkedIn posts at least five hun­dred thou­sand new pieces of writ­ing a month.) It would list every job every­where and pro­vide a pro­file for every mem­ber of the glob­al work­force, includ­ing blue-col­lar work­ers. Every time you changed jobs or need­ed to acquire a new skill, you would use LinkedIn.

    ...

    “Hoff­man is con­vinced that we can fix the prob­lem through Inter­net-enabled net­works. Work is already becom­ing more tem­po­rary, spo­radic, and infor­mal, and this change should be embraced. Many more peo­ple will become entre­pre­neur­ial, if not entre­pre­neurs. The keep­er of your career will be not your employ­er but your per­son­al network—so you’d bet­ter put a lot of effort into mak­ing it as exten­sive and as vital as pos­si­ble. A twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry ver­sion of William H. Whyte’s mem­o­rably titled 1956 book “The Orga­ni­za­tion Man” would, by Hoffman’s log­ic, be called “The Net­work Man,” and this vir­tu­al struc­ture would define the age as ful­ly as the big cor­po­ra­tion defined the ear­li­er age.”

    And in order to achieve this utopi­an future, Hoff­man warns that it’s going to require “try­ing to get politi­cians to under­stand that solv­ing this prob­lem is about facil­i­ta­tion of a net­work, as opposed to”—sarcastically—“the New Deal.”:

    ...
    Because Sil­i­con Val­ley jobs don’t car­ry with them twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry expec­ta­tions about secu­ri­ty and ben­e­fits, employ­ers com­pen­sate peo­ple as much as pos­si­ble with stock, so that they think of them­selves as own­ers rather than employ­ees. It’s assumed that what every­body real­ly wants is to quit and cre­ate a start­up, and, for those who aren’t in tech, the future as imag­ined in Sil­i­con Val­ley may not entail full-time employ­ment at all. Instead, peo­ple would assem­ble their eco­nom­ic lives through ele­ments pro­vid­ed by online mar­ket­place com­pa­nies from Sil­i­con Val­ley: a lit­tle Uber dri­ving here, a lit­tle TaskRab­bit­ing there.

    If you grant Hoffman’s premise that the net­worked econ­o­my is the new mod­el, you can view its advent with excite­ment or with unease. Hoff­man likes to cite a sta­tis­tic from a Unit­ed Nations paper on sus­tain­able devel­op­ment goals: the glob­al econ­o­my will need six hun­dred mil­lion new jobs over the next twen­ty years, and exist­ing busi­ness can pro­vide only ten to twen­ty mil­lion of them. The rest, he claims, will have to come from star­tups, so soci­eties every­where will have to reori­ent them­selves sig­nif­i­cant­ly in order to make entre­pre­neur­ship eas­i­er.

    That is the object of all Hoffman’s polit­i­cal and phil­an­thropic activ­i­ty. As he told one vis­i­tor, “I’m try­ing to get politi­cians to under­stand that solv­ing this prob­lem is about facil­i­ta­tion of a net­work, as opposed to”—sarcastically—“the New Deal.” He has a soar­ing opti­mism in the pow­er of his mod­el to make life bet­ter for every­body, and believes that the pre-Inter­net arrange­ments can’t do that. He told me that he has con­clud­ed over the past year that the Amer­i­can polit­i­cal par­ties are too entrenched to solve the country’s prob­lems, so he’s unlike­ly, in this elec­tion cycle, to be mak­ing anoth­er big con­tri­bu­tion to Pri­or­i­ties USA, the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Super PAC he sup­port­ed in 2012. (Thus far, among the Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, he has had pri­vate meet­ings with Hillary Clin­ton and Jeb Bush, but has not made up his mind whom to sup­port for Pres­i­dent.) What he’s try­ing to achieve, he says, is “mas­sive, out­size, dis­con­tin­u­ous impact.”
    ...

    So Hoff­man’s solu­tion to a cri­sis in con­tem­po­rary cap­i­tal­ism and increas­ing sys­temic inequal­i­ty and unem­ploy­ment is to turn every­one into a con­trac­tor and just let the pow­er of net­work­ing work its mag­ic. Mag­ic that will be absolute­ly vital since “the glob­al econ­o­my will need six hun­dred mil­lion new jobs over the next twen­ty years, and exist­ing busi­ness can pro­vide only ten to twen­ty mil­lion of them. The rest, he claims, will have to come from star­tups, so soci­eties every­where will have to reori­ent them­selves sig­nif­i­cant­ly in order to make entre­pre­neur­ship eas­i­er.”

    Yes, accord­ing to Hoff­man, soci­eties every­where need to reori­ent them­selves sig­nif­i­cant­ly to make “entre­pre­neur­ship” eas­i­er, which will appar­ent­ly involve Uber-izing employ­ment on a mass scale, or else we’re all going to be run­ning half a bil­lion jobs short over the next 20 years by Hoff­man’s esti­mates. And he’s con­sid­ered to be one of Sil­i­con Val­ley’s lefty oli­garchs. It’s a lit­tle odd, but, in fair­ness, rel­a­tive to his right(er)-leaning coun­ter­parts, he is some­what to the left. Some­what:

    Busi­ness Insid­er
    Why Does Sil­i­con Val­ley Vote For Democ­rats?

    Hen­ry Blod­get

    Feb. 16, 2012, 2:55 PM

    One con­tention of the Repub­li­can par­ty is that Democ­rats don’t under­stand busi­ness and are bad for busi­ness.

    GOP front-run­ner Mitt Rom­ney has basi­cal­ly built his entire cam­paign on the the­o­ry that he knows how to run an econ­o­my and the Democ­rats don’t.

    Giv­en this, why does one of the most suc­cess­ful busi­ness-regions of Amer­i­ca over­whelm­ing­ly vote Demo­c­ra­t­ic?

    And if Demo­c­ra­t­ic “big-gov­ern­ment” and “high tax­es” choke off inno­va­tion, invest­ment, and incen­tives, why have so many com­pa­nies locat­ed in high-tax, high­ly reg­u­lat­ed Cal­i­for­nia done so extra­or­di­nar­i­ly well?

    We put these ques­tions to Reid Hoff­man, who is one of the most suc­cess­ful entre­pre­neurs and investors in the coun­try. A part­ner at Sil­i­con Val­ley ven­ture cap­i­tal firm Grey­lock, Reid has invest­ed in Face­book, Zyn­ga, and many oth­er com­pa­nies. He is also the co-founder of one of last year’s stand­out IPOs: LinkedIn.

    In Reid Hoff­man’s opin­ion, Sil­i­con Val­ley’s suc­cess comes despite Cal­i­for­ni­a’s reg­u­la­to­ry envi­ron­ment and “big gov­ern­ment,” not because of it. Sil­i­con Val­ley, Hoff­man says, is pow­ered by its amaz­ing ecosys­tem of investors, engi­neers, and entre­pre­neurs, along with more than a half-cen­tu­ry of start-up cul­ture. And the Val­ley’s over­whelm­ing sup­port of Democ­rats, Hoff­man sug­gests, is due as much to the Democ­rats’ social views as their eco­nom­ic views.

    But Sil­i­con Val­ley is a big fan of the Democ­rats’ efforts to help start-ups, Hoff­man says.

    And Hoff­man ridicules the Repub­li­can argu­ment that increased tax­es would make him and oth­er investors and entre­pre­neurs work less hard.

    So there we go: Hoff­man sup­ports the Democ­rats despite the par­ty’s sup­port for thinks like reg­u­la­tions or “big gov­ern­ment” and more due to social issues. And he scoffs at the notion that the ultra rich would­n’t work as hard with high­er tax­es. So, in that respect, he real­ly is kind of sort of more lib­er­al than, say, Peter Thiel: Hoff­man appears to still be a hyper-cap­i­tal­ist tech­no­crat that can’t envi­sion a future that does­n’t involve some sort of hell­ish glob­al rat race where every­one is as inse­cure as their social net­work allows, but at least he seems to have social­ly lib­er­al view on non-eco­nom­ic mat­ters. Sort he’s sort of a Lib­er­tar­i­an-oli­garch-lite: his visions for the future is prob­a­bly going to be a stressed out tech­no-hellscape that almost no one enjoys, but he could be worse!

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 6, 2015, 1:58 pm
  2. If the let­ter “S” did­n’t already have an assign­ment under Google’s new “Alpha­bet” cor­po­rate shell, that’s should­n’t be the case any­more: “S” is for “Sym­pho­ny”:

    The Wall Street Jour­nal
    Google Takes Stake in Mes­sag­ing Start­up Sym­pho­ny Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Ser­vices
    New fundrais­ing round val­ues Sym­pho­ny at $650 mil­lion

    By Sarah Krouse and
    Justin Baer
    Updat­ed Oct. 5, 2015 2:51 p.m. ET

    Google Inc. plans to invest in a new round of fund­ing for Sym­pho­ny Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Ser­vices LLC that val­ues the Wall Street-backed mes­sag­ing com­pa­ny at about $650 mil­lion, peo­ple famil­iar with the mat­ter said.

    Google’s sup­port adds a tech­nol­o­gy-indus­try stal­wart to the list of banks and invest­ment firms—such as Gold­man Sachs Group Inc., Mor­gan Stan­ley and Black­Rock Inc. —that have backed Sym­pho­ny and its fledg­ling com­mu­ni­ca­tions soft­ware. Symphony’s lat­est fund­ing round is expect­ed to close this week, the peo­ple said.

    Sym­pho­ny was cre­at­ed as an alter­na­tive to Bloomberg LP’s ter­mi­nals, which have long been a hall­mark of trad­ing floors but are viewed as a major cost cen­ter for finan­cial firms.

    The start­up plat­form ini­tial­ly made its encryp­tion tech­nol­o­gy a sell­ing point, but attract­ed reg­u­la­to­ry atten­tion from the New York State Depart­ment of Finan­cial Ser­vices, which was con­cerned about record-keep­ing. The agency, New York’s top bank­ing watch­dog, reached a deal last month with the four banks it reg­u­lates that invest­ed in Sym­pho­ny over how to keep their records.

    The agency said at the time that the agree­ment with Gold­man, Deutsche Bank AG , Cred­it Suisse Group AG and Bank of New York Mel­lon Corp. was “to help ensure the banks’ respon­si­ble use” of Sym­pho­ny. The deal requires the plat­form to keep copies of all elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tions sent to or from the four banks through Sym­pho­ny for sev­en years.

    The Wall Street Jour­nal report­ed in July that Sym­pho­ny was seek­ing invest­ments that could val­ue the start­up at up to $1 bil­lion. It is unclear how the reg­u­la­to­ry atten­tion affect­ed Symphony’s bid to raise new mon­ey, or the sub­se­quent val­u­a­tion.

    An ini­tial 14 firms invest­ed $66 mil­lion in Sym­pho­ny, which bought Palo Alto, Calif.-based start­up Per­zo Inc. last year. Gold­man led the con­sor­tium and con­tributed its in-house mes­sag­ing sys­tem.

    ...

    While it’s pos­si­ble that Google sim­ply wants in on a grow­ing mar­ket for finan­cial indus­try super-encrypt­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­forms, keep in mind the Sym­pho­ny’s tune might res­onate with a num­ber of oth­er indus­tries that would also like a super-encrypt­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion plat­form and expand­ing into oth­er sec­tors was always part of the plan:

    Tech Crunch
    Wall Street-Backed Sym­pho­ny Wants To Rev­o­lu­tion­ize Finan­cial Ser­vices Com­mu­ni­ca­tion
    Post­ed Feb 21, 2015 by Ron Miller

    ympho­ny, a com­pa­ny backed by some of the world’s elite finan­cial insti­tu­tions, was cre­at­ed last Fall with a mis­sion to trans­form the way Wall Street shares and col­lab­o­rates around con­tent — and it has set its sights set on some of the world’s most estab­lished con­tent and com­mu­ni­ca­tions tools.

    The company’s back­ers include a who’s who of Wall Street finan­cial com­pa­nies: Bank of Amer­i­ca Mer­rill Lynch, BNY Mel­lon, Black­Rock, Citadel, Citi, Cred­it Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Gold­man Sachs, HSBC, Jef­feries, JPMor­gan, Mav­er­ick, Mor­gan Stan­ley, Nomu­ra and Wells Far­go.

    Last fall, these com­pa­nies con­tributed $66M to finance Sym­pho­ny, and using that mon­ey, pur­chased Per­zo, a com­pa­ny that was build­ing a secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions plat­form. After the pur­chase, they named Per­zo founder David Gurle as Sym­pho­ny CEO.

    Gurle, whose back­ground comes right out of busi­ness soft­ware cen­tral cast­ing with stints at Microsoft Lync, Skype and Thom­son Reuters, would seem unique­ly qual­i­fied to build such a prod­uct. Symphony’s back­ers have been using a vari­ety of secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions appli­ca­tions and con­tent tools, but that frag­men­ta­tion was becom­ing a huge prob­lem.

    They were look­ing to con­sol­i­date on a sin­gle, secure plat­form, and they cre­at­ed Sym­pho­ny to replace many of the estab­lished play­ers — whether that’s Microsoft Lync or AOL (TechCrunch’s par­ent com­pa­ny) or Yahoo! instant mes­sag­ing in com­mu­ni­ca­tions or Thom­son Reuters and Bloomberg in finan­cial con­tent. The goal from the start has been to become the de fac­to tool for com­mu­ni­cat­ing, col­lab­o­rat­ing and shar­ing con­tent in a finan­cial ser­vices set­ting.

    “Those com­pa­nies that invest­ed in Sym­pho­ny real­ize they can’t live in a frag­ment­ed way for­ev­er. It’s not good for busi­ness,” Gurle explained. “They put their mon­ey in to make the busi­ness suc­cess­ful and to make Sym­pho­ny suc­cess­ful. You don’t see this align very often,” he said.

    ...

    Can They Pull It Off?

    R Ray Wang, prin­ci­pal at Con­stel­la­tion Research describes Gurle as a vision­ary and believes that Sym­pho­ny is cre­at­ing an entire­ly new cat­e­go­ry of soft­ware.

    By tar­get­ing the finan­cial ser­vices indus­tries first, they show to every oth­er indus­try from gov­ern­ments to retail that here’s a way to bring these sys­tems of engage­ment to cre­ate dig­i­tal dis­rup­tion in the mar­ket,” Wang told TechCrunch.

    “When the orig­i­nal design point is about secu­ri­ty and com­pli­ance to some of the strictest stan­dards set by gov­ern­ments on finan­cial ser­vices, that’s no com­par­i­son to com­pa­nies adding secu­ri­ty on as an after fact,” Wang said.

    He added that the core prod­uct Per­zo was built for mas­sive shar­ing of mas­sive amounts of infor­ma­tion at finan­cial-ser­vices secu­ri­ty scale. He believes Sym­pho­ny has the poten­tial to cre­ate pri­vate col­lab­o­ra­tion net­works and even­tu­al­ly per­haps even pub­lic ones.

    As for that con­tent com­po­nent, Wang says that could be the tough­est part to pull off. “The goal is to be able to burst con­tent with heavy con­text. They have the tech­nol­o­gy, but I’m not sure if they have the con­text yet. That takes time,” he said.

    Look­ing Ahead

    While today the prod­uct focus­es pri­mar­i­ly on the needs of finan­cial ser­vices, Gurle says over time, the con­tent can adapt to the many dif­fer­ent con­tent-cen­tric indus­tries such as life sci­ences, med­i­cine, ship­ping, man­u­fac­tur­ing, account­ing, legal and ener­gy.

    For now, Gurle wants to get the finan­cial ser­vices piece right, then he sees going after adja­cent mar­kets like legal and account­ing. After that, per­haps they can begin to go after oth­er indus­tries, but the roadmap is in place now.

    The plan is even­tu­al­ly to cre­ate an open source ecosys­tem around Sym­pho­ny, but Gurle says how that will work and which com­po­nents will go into open source is still very much being debat­ed inter­nal­ly.

    The prod­uct has been in Alpha since Jan­u­ary with the 15 fun­ders and a thou­sand dai­ly active users, pre­s­e­lect­ed from pub­lic alphas appli­cants. It plans to go into a wider Beta release with 10,000 users in April and to become gen­er­al­ly avail­able by the end of June or ear­ly July. By that point, the com­pa­ny will have a bet­ter sense of which pieces they will put into open source and which they will con­trol. It could poten­tial­ly oper­ate like Piv­otal, which open sourced pieces of its Big Data Suite last week, while hold­ing oth­er parts back for the com­mer­cial ver­sion, but how it will work with Sym­pho­ny is still being decid­ed.

    ...

    “While today the prod­uct focus­es pri­mar­i­ly on the needs of finan­cial ser­vices, Gurle says over time, the con­tent can adapt to the many dif­fer­ent con­tent-cen­tric indus­tries such as life sci­ences, med­i­cine, ship­ping, man­u­fac­tur­ing, account­ing, legal and ener­gy.”
    Sym­pho­ny for every­one! And should Sym­pho­ny expand to oth­er indus­tries, it’s cer­tain­ly pos­si­ble that large play­ers will also be forced to keep copies of their encryp­tion keys with a 3rd par­ty in a sim­i­lar com­pro­mise to what was reached with four of the large Sym­pho­ny clients/investors to allow for reg­u­la­to­ry over­sight. But, of course, that com­pro­mise deal does­n’t actu­al­ly apply to any oth­er Sym­pho­ny clients. Just those four large Sym­pho­ny users that also hap­pen to be investors. And giv­en the high­ly reg­u­lat­ed nature of finan­cial indus­try com­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pare to many oth­er indus­tries, it does­n’t seem very like­ly that oth­er indus­tries would be sub­ject to even that “com­pro­mise” for greater over­sight.

    So who knows, we could be see­ing super-encrypt­ed “col­lab­o­ra­tion” mes­sag­ing sys­tems pop up in all sorts of indus­tries, com­pli­ments of Gold­man Sachs and now Google. Just imag­ine how many indus­tries might be inter­est­ed in this kind of tool. For instance, there’s lots of col­lab­o­ra­tion involved with auto man­u­fac­tur­ing. Could auto man­u­fac­tur­ers do what they need to get done in terms of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with their var­i­ous parts sup­pli­ers, etc, using Sym­pho­ny? If so, there’s prob­a­bly a com­pa­ny Wolfs­burg that wish­es it had been using Sym­pho­ny for the last decade or so:

    Reuters

    VW Scan­dal: Ger­man Pros­e­cu­tors Raid Com­pa­ny Facil­i­ties for Evi­dence

    Oct 8 2015, 9:28 am ET

    BERLIN — Ger­man pros­e­cu­tors raid­ed Volk­swa­gen’s head­quar­ters and oth­er offices on Thurs­day as part of their inves­ti­ga­tion into the car­mak­er’s rig­ging of diesel emis­sions tests.

    Pros­e­cu­tors in Braun­schweig, near the com­pa­ny’s head­quar­ters in Wolfs­burg, said the aim of the search­es was to “secure doc­u­ments and data stor­age devices” that could iden­ti­fy those involved in the alleged manip­u­la­tion and explain how it was car­ried out.

    Volk­swa­gen said it was sup­port­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion and had hand­ed over a “com­pre­hen­sive” range of doc­u­ments.

    Almost three weeks after it con­fessed pub­licly to rig­ging U.S. emis­sions tests, Europe’s largest car­mak­er is under huge pres­sure to iden­ti­fy those respon­si­ble, fix affect­ed vehi­cles and clar­i­fy exact­ly how and where the cheat­ing hap­pened.

    ...

    In a state­ment on Thurs­day, Volk­swa­gen said it was still inves­ti­gat­ing whether or to what extent the soft­ware inter­fered ille­gal­ly with vehi­cles.

    “Pros­e­cu­tors in Braun­schweig, near the com­pa­ny’s head­quar­ters in Wolfs­burg, said the aim of the search­es was to “secure doc­u­ments and data stor­age devices” that could iden­ti­fy those involved in the alleged manip­u­la­tion and explain how it was car­ried out.
    There’s an app for that.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | October 8, 2015, 1:28 pm
  3. Mark Ames has a recent piece on the lat­est attempt to “Uber-ize” anoth­er piece of the “old econ­o­my”, this time it’s truck­ing in the cross-hairs, and it makes a crit­i­cal point that’s going to be increas­ing­ly vital to keep in mind when assess­ing the poten­tial impact the lib­er­tar­i­an hyper-cap­i­tal­ist tech oli­garchs are going to have on soci­ety going for­ward: “For all of the Internet’s ini­tial promise (and cant) of smash­ing tra­di­tion­al hier­ar­chies and cre­at­ing hor­i­zon­tal struc­tures that democ­ra­tize pow­er and pol­i­tics, the real­i­ty is that the Inter­net econ­o­my has cen­tral­ized pow­er and wealth and the polit­i­cal econ­o­my on a scale not real­ly seen since the rail­roads destroyed the old econ­o­my and quick­ly cre­at­ed huge­ly cen­tral­ized new indus­tries, which cen­tral­ized into trusts — and cre­at­ed a class of oli­garchs with out­sized wealth and pow­er that no democ­ra­cy could sur­vive.”

    Pan­do Dai­ly
    With “Con­voy,” tech bil­lion­aires build anoth­er cas­tle at anoth­er nar­row in the stream

    By Mark Ames
    writ­ten on Novem­ber 4, 2015

    America’s truck­ing indus­try is a $749 bil­lion sec­tor in need of dis­rup­tion.

    And last week, A‑list Big Tech bil­lion­aire investors—led by (in order of bil­lions) Jeff Bezos, Uber co-founder Gar­rett Camp, and The Inter­cept pub­lish­er Pierre Omidyar—rolled out their lat­est start­up, Con­voy, with the goal of doing to the truck­ing indus­try what Uber has done for taxis.

    The ini­tial invest­ment is small — a total of $2.5 mil­lion — but the stakes are poten­tial­ly huge, as are the net worths of the oth­er investors in Con­voy: bil­lion­aires Marc Benioff, Drew Hous­ton, Hen­ry Kravis; for­mer Star­bucks CEO Howard Behar; angel investors Ali and Hadi Par­tovi; Expe­dia CEO Dara Khos­row­shahi; and the secre­tive invest­ment bank Allen & Co, which hosts the annu­al Sun Val­ley bil­lion­aires’ retreat, and which fea­tures ex-CIA chief George Tenet as man­ag­ing direc­tor.

    What’s sig­nif­i­cant is not the pock­et change each Big Tech/Big Finance bil­lion­aire dropped into the Con­voy kit­ty, but their cal­iber — and their expec­ta­tion of being able to recon­fig­ure the flow of all those inef­fi­cient truck­ing indus­try bil­lions spilling around the old econ­o­my. As Hadi Par­tovi told Bloomberg last week,

    As an angel investor, it’s the largest mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ty I’ve ever seen, at least since look­ing at Face­book in 2005.

    Whether or not Con­voy turns out to be the Uber of short-to-medi­um-haul busi­ness-to-busi­ness truck­ing, it’s safe to assume that some­time soon, tech will trans­form and restruc­ture the $749 bil­lion truck­ing sec­tor in a sim­i­lar way. And usu­al­ly this means smash­ing the old struc­tures, con­nect­ing users more seam­less­ly — and cen­tral­iza­tion on a scale nev­er before thought pos­si­ble.

    For all of the Internet’s ini­tial promise (and cant) of smash­ing tra­di­tion­al hier­ar­chies and cre­at­ing hor­i­zon­tal struc­tures that democ­ra­tize pow­er and pol­i­tics, the real­i­ty is that the Inter­net econ­o­my has cen­tral­ized pow­er and wealth and the polit­i­cal econ­o­my on a scale not real­ly seen since the rail­roads destroyed the old econ­o­my and quick­ly cre­at­ed huge­ly cen­tral­ized new indus­tries, which cen­tral­ized into trusts — and cre­at­ed a class of oli­garchs with out­sized wealth and pow­er that no democ­ra­cy could sur­vive.

    Uber is one of the clear­est exam­ples of how this works: Hun­dreds of small local taxi monop­o­lies around the coun­try and the world are smashed, a huge new pool of unused labor and assets are brought into the taxi mar­ket, ben­e­fit­ing the taxi con­sumer (usu­al­ly) — but more impor­tant­ly, cen­tral­iz­ing all the rev­enues dis­lodged from the hun­dreds of dis­rupt­ed local taxi monop­o­lies around the world, to be dis­trib­uted among a tiny group of already-wealthy guys who own shares in the cen­tral­ized taxi mega-monop­oly.

    The same was true with Con­voy investor Jeff Bezos’ Amazon.com — which destroyed most of the small- and medi­um-sized book­store indus­try, and has been lay­ing waste to the pub­lish­ing indus­try as well, by cen­tral­iz­ing the con­sumer-to-busi­ness all under one monop­oly roof. Today, Jeff Bezos is the third rich­est Amer­i­can worth $53.2 bil­lion (if you sub­scribe to the fic­tion that David Koch actu­al­ly is worth the 50/50 split that his mean­er broth­er Charles allows him—in real­i­ty, the Koch broth­ers’ com­bined $105 bil­lion net worth is all Charles’, but he wise­ly wants to avoid the neg­a­tive atten­tion that 12-fig­ure wealth brings).

    Like­wise, Omidyar’s eBay rolled up and cen­tral­ized much of the clas­si­fieds busi­ness that used to be wide­ly dis­trib­uted in small and large news­pa­pers across the coun­try, cen­tral­iz­ing America’s and parts of the globe’s clas­si­fieds and small busi­ness adver­tis­ing busi­ness into one mega-clas­si­fieds, mak­ing bil­lion­aires out of him, Meg Whit­man and Jeff Skoll while padding the pock­ets of his ven­ture cap­i­tal investors. Or in plain English—centralizing the busi­ness, the pow­er and the wealth of that sec­tor in the hands of a tiny few. Which gave Omid­yar the pow­er to roll up the biggest online pay­ments busi­ness, Pay­Pal, into his ver­ti­cal struc­ture — and with his mon­ey, he almost man­aged to roll up eBay’s only domes­tic rival, Craigslist.

    That cen­tral­ized wealth and polit­i­cal pow­er leads to some strange spec­ta­cles, which we the peons can only watch in awe and hor­ror, like mor­tals before the Olympian gods (only our gods like to imag­ine them­selves as Sec­ond Life vir­tu­al heroes rid­ing Seg­ways) — the weird bil­lion­aire rival­ry between online shop­ping bil­lion­aires Bezos and Omid­yar, which a decade or so ago had pegged Omid­yar as the win­ner for not ware­hous­ing any mer­chan­dise, but which then turned in Bezos’ favor; in which Bezos bought the Wash­ing­ton Post before Omid­yar could make up his mind, so Omid­yar pumped the same amount into a fledg­ing new media start­up, while both Bezos and Omid­yar split the biggest trea­sure trove of leaked NSA secrets in his­to­ry...

    That’s the part we see, and we chat­ter about. But there’s a grub­bier side to the fast, dis­in­ter­me­di­at­ed, techie-clean online shop­ping world that’s made con­sumerism so con­ve­nient— and that’s the $749 bil­lion truck­ing indus­try, a labor-inten­sive, old econ­o­my, pol­lu­tion-spew­ing indus­try that serves as the vast grub­by sub­struc­ture to the ecom­merce plat­form super­struc­ture.

    The truck­ing indus­try today is in many ways quite dif­fer­ent from the taxi indus­try that Uber co-founder Gar­ret Camp faced. Truck­ing was the first major indus­try that dereg­u­la­tion was test­ed out on in the 1970s — first under Pres­i­dent Ford, and then in earnest under Jim­my Carter. Ford start­ed the process of truck­ing dereg­u­la­tion in 1975–6, tak­ing the advice of the chair­man of his Coun­cil of Eco­nom­ic Advi­sors: Alan Greenspan.

    Ford was a true believ­er in free-mar­ket ide­ol­o­gy, although he hadn’t ditched anti-monop­oly pol­i­tics the way Rea­gan would. The truck­ing indus­try was large­ly sub­ject­ed to New Deal era reg­u­la­tions, over­seen by the Inter­state Com­merce Com­mis­sion (ICC) since 1935. Dif­fer­ent types of licens­es, weight hauls and types of car­go were all reg­u­lat­ed by the ICC in order to pre­vent the sort of dis­as­trous over-com­pe­ti­tion that fed the Great Depres­sion and its chron­ic defla­tion and pro­duc­tion declines. But the prob­lem in the 1970s was high infla­tion and low growth, and it was thought that dereg­u­la­tion would low­er prices for con­sumers and spur growth in the truck­ing indus­try.

    As Ford said at the time,

    Few sec­tors of the Amer­i­can econ­o­my were more sti­fled by gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion than the trans­porta­tion indus­try, and I thought dereg­u­la­tion was urgent­ly required.

    One of Ford’s biggest allies in the Senate—at least in dereg­u­lat­ing the air­line industry—was Sen­a­tor Ted Kennedy; and to help him push through air­line dereg­u­la­tion, Kennedy brought a Har­vard pro­fes­sor to Wash­ing­ton named Stephen Brey­er. (FedEx became the biggest ben­e­fi­cia­ry of dereg­u­lat­ing the air car­go indus­try, and lat­er FedEx become a truck­ing indus­try leader too—and its busi­ness is increas­ing­ly tied direct­ly into the ecom­merce struc­ture.)

    The under­ly­ing neolib­er­al idea dri­ving Kennedy and a lot of oth­er “New Democ­rats” in the 70s was decen­tral­iza­tion and anti-monop­oly— in which the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment was the bad cen­tral­iz­ing monop­oly pow­er sti­fling com­pe­ti­tion. The prob­lem of course would come when, freed from reg­u­la­tion and then antitrust over­sight, many of these indus­tries would become pri­vate­ly cen­tral­ized far worse and far more coer­cive­ly than when they were reg­u­lat­ed under the ICC.

    ...

    Dereg­u­lat­ing truck­ing meant free­ing up truck­ers to become inde­pen­dent small busi­ness­men; but they quick­ly start­ed los­ing con­trol over their fates as they relied on the con­sol­i­dat­ed big freight busi­ness­es like FedEx and UPS to nego­ti­ate rate pay with the thou­sands of small truck­ing bro­kers and firms that they used. The big freight com­pa­nies, like their New Econ­o­my coun­ter­parts, want “inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors” rather than full-time employ­ees who cost a lot more and who are cov­ered bet­ter by fed­er­al and local labor reg­u­la­tions.

    Last year, the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Lydia DePil­lis did a series of great and at times wrench­ing arti­cles on the harsh, declin­ing lives of port truck­ers, just as the Team­sters were try­ing to orga­nize them into unions. (Before dereg­u­la­tion, the Team­sters had a lock on much of the reg­u­lat­ed truck­ing work­force, but that lock—sul­lied by mob ties—got bro­ken up by dereg­u­la­tion.)

    In her arti­cle, “Truck­ing Used to be a Tick­et to the Mid­dle Class, Now It’s Just a Low-Paid Job” DePil­lis writes,

    Since Con­gress dereg­u­lat­ed the indus­try in the 1980s — when a union­ized truck dri­ver made today’s equiv­a­lent of $44.83 an hour — about two-thirds of the nation’s 75,000-odd port truck dri­vers have become inde­pen­dent oper­a­tors. And now, “inde­pen­dence” has become short­hand for earn­ing less: Own­er-oper­a­tors make an aver­age of $28,000 a year. That’s $7,000 less than employ­ee dri­vers, who are paid by the hour and typ­i­cal­ly receive more com­pre­hen­sive ben­e­fits.

    In oth­er words: The indus­try work­force and assets have already been Uber-ized, only with­out the tech plat­form and tech bil­lion­aire polit­i­cal pow­er to restruc­ture and re-cen­tral­ize all those rev­enues. Inde­pen­dent con­trac­tors mean cheap­er labor costs and no lega­cy costs; it also means shift­ing the costs of cap­i­tal invest­ments (trucks, gaso­line, insur­ance, main­te­nance) onto the “inde­pen­dent con­trac­tor” just as Uber has done. And that has result­ed in a lot of unre­port­ed mis­ery and pain for the tens of thou­sands of truck­ers whose work ser­vices the ecom­merce plat­forms that made billionaire/media titans of Bezos and Omid­yar.

    ...

    In For­tune magazine’s descrip­tion of Con­voy, if you sift through all the cant about inef­fi­cien­cies, what you real­ly get is a blue­print for mas­sive­ly cen­tral­iz­ing a high­ly decen­tral­ized indus­try:

    Local freight ship­ping is an extreme­ly frag­ment­ed mar­ket, with lots of small pro­pri­etors. Wash­ing­ton state alone has more than 24,000 such com­pa­nies, Dan Lewis, founder and chief exec­u­tive of Con­voy, told For­tune.

    Right now the process of find­ing a car­ri­er to han­dle a giv­en load typ­i­cal­ly involves a round-robin of calls between the cus­tomer, a bro­ker, and the car­ri­ers. The bro­ker acts as a go-between to find an open car­ri­er, work out price, and book the busi­ness. “It’s a very man­u­al and phone-tag­gy process,” Lewis said.

    For their trou­ble, the bro­kers charge any­where from 20% to 45% of the job’s worth, Lewis said.

    Convoy’s aim is to auto­mate that process, putting the cus­tomer togeth­er with the car­ri­er using a back-end sys­tem run­ning on Ama­zon Web Ser­vices and an Android app on the front end. A ver­sion that uses Apple’s iOS mobile soft­ware is com­ing soon.

    Indeed.

    The ques­tion of who ben­e­fits from this “effi­cien­cy” and what it means can be quan­ti­fied. When the rev­enues are con­cen­trat­ed through an app or two, and dis­trib­uted to a small hand­ful of incred­i­bly wealthy investors, there you have the real archi­tec­ture of this New Econ­o­my truck­ing indus­try.

    Or anoth­er way of look­ing at how Inter­net com­pa­nies like Uber, Ama­zon, eBay and, if it all goes well, Con­voy oper­ate — the metaphor of “the nar­rows” in the stream, as described by JA Hob­son a cen­tu­ry ago:

    Each kind of com­mod­i­ty, as it pass­es through the many process­es from the earth to the con­sumer, may be looked upon as a stream whose chan­nel is broad­er at some points and nar­row at oth­ers. Dif­fer­ent streams of com­modi­ties nar­row at dif­fer­ent places. Some are nar­row­est and in fewest hands at the trans­port stage, oth­ers in one of the process­es of man­u­fac­ture, oth­ers in the hands of export mer­chants. . . .

    In the case of Inter­net Econ­o­my, the “nar­rows” are the app or the plat­form which con­trol the stream; now replace “Ger­man barons” with “Bezos” or “Omid­yar”:

    Just as a num­ber of Ger­man barons plant­ed their cas­tles along the banks of the Rhine, in order to tax the com­merce between East and West which was oblig­ed to make use of this high­way, so it is with these eco­nom­ic ‘nar­rows.’ Wher­ev­er they are found, monop­o­lies plant them­selves in the shape of ‘rings,’ ‘cor­ners,’ ‘pools,’ ‘syn­di­cates,’ or trusts.’

    With Con­voy, anoth­er cas­tle is being built at anoth­er nar­row in the stream.

    “The ques­tion of who ben­e­fits from this “effi­cien­cy” and what it means can be quan­ti­fied. When the rev­enues are con­cen­trat­ed through an app or two, and dis­trib­uted to a small hand­ful of incred­i­bly wealthy investors, there you have the real archi­tec­ture of this New Econ­o­my truck­ing indus­try.”
    Yep, the New Econ­o­my truck­ing indus­try prob­a­bly going to be pret­ty “effi­cient”. At least in terms of cost of labor effi­cien­cy. How those “effi­cien­cies” get divid­ed between the new tech truck­ing barons with their “nar­row stream” oli­gop­o­lies and the end con­sumers of shipped prod­ucts will be some­thing to watch.

    And in oth­er news...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 9, 2015, 3:21 pm
  4. The recent stu­dent protests at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­souri just took an unfor­tu­nate turn fol­low­ing a series of vio­lent threats against the cam­pus’s black stu­dents issued via Yik Yak, an anony­mous app decid­ed to let users says what­ev­er about what­ev­er, but total­ly anony­mous­ly. For­tu­nate­ly, the threat­en­ing Yik Yak user has been arrest­ed. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, as the below points out, this is far from the first time Yik Yak has been used in this man­ner, and there’s no indi­ca­tion that’s going to change any time soon:

    The Wash­ing­ton Post
    What is Yik Yak, the app that field­ed racist threats at Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­souri?

    By Caitlin Dewey
    Novem­ber 11 at 10:51 AM

    On Tues­day evening, stu­dents at the embat­tled Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­souri noticed sev­er­al dis­turb­ing mes­sages on the anony­mous mes­sag­ing app Yik Yak.

    “I’m going to stand my ground tomor­row and shoot every black per­son I see,” read one.

    “Some of you are alright. Don’t go to cam­pus tomor­row,” said the sec­ond, echo­ing a warn­ing post­ed to 4chan the day before the Umpqua Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege shoot­ing last month.

    Uni­ver­si­ty of Mis­souri police have said they appre­hend­ed the per­son sus­pect­ed of post­ing both threats and have reas­sured stu­dents that there’s no cause for fur­ther con­cern. (The school in Colum­bia, Mo., is oper­at­ing nor­mal­ly, and class­es have not been can­celed.) Even if the threats were emp­ty, how­ev­er, they’re sure to inflame con­cerns over the ever-con­tro­ver­sial Yik Yak, which only three weeks ago was panned by a coali­tion of 70 women’s and civ­il rights groups as a font of dis­crim­i­na­tion, harass­ment and abuse.

    Yik Yak is essen­tial­ly a pub­lic, anony­mous, loca­tion-based mes­sage board: After down­load­ing the app, you can post any­thing you want to near­by read­ers — who can then com­ment, up-vote or down-vote your “yak,” also anony­mous­ly.

    ...

    What is Yik Yak?

    Yik Yak is an anony­mous, loca­tion-based bul­letin board that — per the ana­lyt­ics firm App Annie — has ranked among the top 30 social media apps in the Unit­ed States almost con­stant­ly since 2014. The com­pa­ny has raised more than $73 mil­lion in fund­ing, most of it from Sil­i­con Val­ley pow­er­house Sequia Cap­i­tal. It’s val­ued at between $200 mil­lion and $300 mil­lion.

    While the app is pop­u­lar among col­lege stu­dents, it’s got­ten lack­lus­ter reviews else­where. Com­mon Sense Media, the children’s advo­ca­cy group, gives it a a one star rat­ing out of five — appar­ent­ly because a zero-star option is not avail­able. “Yik Yak’s just yucky,” the orga­ni­za­tion wrote. “It’s a gos­sipy, lewd, crass online envi­ron­ment in which any­thing goes.”

    Has Yik Yak had prob­lems with threats or harass­ment in the past?

    It has! So many prob­lems, in fact, that on Oct. 21, a coali­tion of civ­il rights groups descend­ed on Wash­ing­ton, D.C., to urge the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion to issue guide­lines against it. (The DoE has said it “looks for­ward to respond­ing,” though it hasn’t yet.) At this rate, the app is field­ing a new high-pro­file inci­dent rough­ly every two weeks. A sam­pling:

    * Threats of a mass shoot­ing at Charleston South­ern Uni­ver­si­ty and Cal Fres­no State in Novem­ber 2015
    * Threats of a mass shoot­ing at Emory Uni­ver­si­ty and Lee Uni­ver­si­ty in Octo­ber 2015
    * A spate of racist com­men­tary at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty in Octo­ber 2015
    * Threats of a shoot­ing at Flori­da Atlantic Uni­ver­si­ty in Sep­tem­ber 2015
    * Threats of rape and mur­der at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary Wash­ing­ton in spring 2015
    * “Racial­ly offen­sive” mes­sages at Clem­son Uni­ver­si­ty in Jan­u­ary 2015
    * Sex­u­al­ly explic­it com­ments about female pro­fes­sors at East­ern Michi­gan Uni­ver­si­ty in Jan­u­ary 2015
    * Threats of vio­lence and sex­u­al assault at Keny­on Col­lege in Octo­ber 2014
    * Threats of a “Columbine-like” shoot­ing at Widen­er Uni­ver­si­ty, and of a “Vir­ginia Tech part 2″ at Tow­son Uni­ver­si­ty, in Octo­ber 2014
    * A sex tape post­ed (non-con­sen­su­al­ly) at Rowan Uni­ver­si­ty in Sep­tem­ber 2014

    The list goes on, need­less to say, but these are some of the events to make the news. Vic­tims allege that a range of cyber­bul­ly­ing and mali­cious gos­sip goes down out­side the spot­light, too.

    Has Yik Yak done any­thing about it?

    Well, yes — but not as much as crit­ics would hope. When the app launched in 2013, it was avail­able to col­lege and high school stu­dents. Yik Yak has since marked the app 17+ in the Apple and Google Play stores, a fea­ture that allows par­ents to block younger kids from down­load­ing it. They also part­nered with a com­pa­ny called Mapon­ics to draw “geofences” around ele­men­tary, mid­dle and high schools, effec­tive­ly mak­ing the app unavail­able with­in a giv­en dis­tance from that loca­tion.

    Since ear­ly 2015, Yik Yak has also dis­played a warn­ing when users attempt to post phone num­bers or mes­sages with cer­tain key­words, such as “bomb”: “Pump the breaks,” it reads, in part, “this yak may con­tain threat­en­ing lan­guage.”

    Still, many peo­ple have argued this isn’t enough and that Yik Yak needs to do more to pro­tect users from abuse. While the app warns users not to “bul­ly” oth­er users or to “post oth­er people’s phone num­bers, street address­es … or oth­er per­son­al­ly iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion,” the abuse fil­ter does not screen for full names or address­es, which makes it a con­ve­nient tool for dox­ing. Yik Yak also pro­vides a way for users to “flag” abu­sive yaks, but the com­pa­ny is far from trans­par­ent about how long it takes mod­er­a­tors to get to flagged mes­sages.

    In late 2014, an 18-year-old woman start­ed a Change.org peti­tion urg­ing Yik Yak’s founders to shut­ter their app, writ­ing that she was bru­tal­ly cyber­bul­lied after attempt­ing to kill her­self. The peti­tion earned more than 80,000 sig­na­tures, and the woman met with founders in Jan­u­ary 2015. In late Octo­ber, how­ev­er, she post­ed an angry update: “They assured me that var­i­ous new poli­cies would go into effect that would pro­tect kids from bul­ly­ing and harass­ment on Yik Yak,” she wrote. “Near­ly a year lat­er, those promis­es have not held up.”

    Can uni­ver­si­ties do any­thing about the app?

    There’s very lit­tle that uni­ver­si­ties can do. At least a dozen have sym­bol­i­cal­ly “banned” the app, or blocked access to it on their Wi-fi net­works. That’s con­tro­ver­sial, though, and pret­ty point­less: Stu­dents can still access the site via their phone’s data ser­vice.

    At least one school — the tiny Col­lege of Ida­ho, in Cald­well, Ida­ho — asked Yik Yak to place a geofence around cam­pus, the same method they use to block the app at high schools. Yik Yak declined.

    “At this rate, the app is field­ing a new high-pro­file inci­dent rough­ly every two weeks.”
    If, as the say­ing goes, there is indeed no such thing as bad adver­tis­ing, Yik Yak’s propen­si­ty to gen­er­ate high-pro­file inci­dents every cou­ple of weeks prob­a­bly isn’t hurt­ing its pop­u­lar­i­ty, which might explain its $200-$300 mil­lion val­u­a­tion from ven­ture cap­i­tal giant Sequoia Cap­i­tal (Sequoia also invest­ed in Whis­per, so they seem to like the anony­mous broad­cast­ing mar­ket).

    Still, you have to won­der how the arrest of the indi­vid­ual that was issu­ing these threats will threat­en Yik Yak’s pop­u­lar­i­ty. After all, what fun (to hor­ri­ble trolls) is an anony­mous app that let’s you say any­thing (like mass death threats) but still might get you caught?! Who (that isn’t a hor­ri­ble per­son) is going to want to use some­thing like that?

    Of course, as the arti­cle below points out, Yik Yak only coop­er­ates with author­i­ties when there’s a sub­poe­na, court order or search war­rant, or an emer­gency request from a law-enforce­ment offi­cial with a com­pelling claim of immi­nent harm. Oth­er­wise, it’s up to the local users to down-vote (and there­fore remove) the harm­ful mes­sages:

    The New York Times
    Who Spewed That Abuse? Anony­mous Yik Yak App Isn’t Telling

    By JONATHAN MAHLER
    MARCH 8, 2015

    Dur­ing a brief recess in an hon­ors course at East­ern Michi­gan Uni­ver­si­ty last fall, a teach­ing assis­tant approached the class’s three female pro­fes­sors. “I think you need to see this,” she said, tap­ping the icon of a fur­ry yak on her iPhone.

    The app opened, and the assis­tant began scrolling through the feed. While the pro­fes­sors had been lec­tur­ing about post-apoc­a­lyp­tic cul­ture, some of the 230 or so fresh­men in the audi­to­ri­um had been hav­ing a sep­a­rate con­ver­sa­tion about them on a social media site called Yik Yak. There were dozens of posts, most demean­ing, many using crude, sex­u­al­ly explic­it lan­guage and imagery.

    After class, one of the pro­fes­sors, Mar­garet Crouch, sent off a flur­ry of emails — with screen­shots of some of the worst mes­sages attached — to var­i­ous uni­ver­si­ty offi­cials, urg­ing them to take some sort of action. “I have been defamed, my rep­u­ta­tion besmirched. I have been sex­u­al­ly harassed and ver­bal­ly abused,” she wrote to her union rep­re­sen­ta­tive. “I am about ready to hire a lawyer.”

    In the end, noth­ing much came of Ms. Crouch’s efforts, for a sim­ple rea­son: Yik Yak is anony­mous. There was no way for the school to know who was respon­si­ble for the posts.

    East­ern Michi­gan is one of a num­ber of uni­ver­si­ties whose cam­pus­es have been roiled by offen­sive “yaks.” Since the app was intro­duced a lit­tle more than a year ago, it has been used to issue threats of mass vio­lence on more than a dozen col­lege cam­pus­es, includ­ing the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na, Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty and Penn State. Racist, homo­pho­bic and misog­y­nist “yaks” have gen­er­at­ed con­tro­ver­sy at many more, among them Clem­son, Emory, Col­gate and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas. At Keny­on Col­lege, a “yakker” pro­posed a gang rape at the school’s women’s cen­ter.

    In much the same way that Face­book swept through the dorm rooms of America’s col­lege stu­dents a decade ago, Yik Yak is now tak­ing their smart­phones by storm. Its enor­mous pop­u­lar­i­ty on cam­pus­es has made it the most fre­quent­ly down­loaded anony­mous social app in Apple’s App Store, eas­i­ly sur­pass­ing com­peti­tors like Whis­per and Secret. At times, it has been one of the store’s 10 most down­loaded apps.

    Like Face­book or Twit­ter, Yik Yak is a social media net­work, only with­out user pro­files. It does not sort mes­sages accord­ing to friends or fol­low­ers but by geo­graph­ic loca­tion or, in many cas­es, by uni­ver­si­ty. Only posts with­in a 1.5‑mile radius appear, mak­ing Yik Yak well suit­ed to col­lege cam­pus­es. Think of it as a vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty bul­letin board — or maybe a vir­tu­al bath­room wall at the stu­dent union. It has become the go-to social feed for col­lege stu­dents across the coun­try to com­mis­er­ate about finals, to find a par­ty or to crack a joke about a rival school.

    Much of the chat­ter is harm­less. Some of it is not.

    “Yik Yak is the Wild West of anony­mous social apps,” said Danielle Keats Cit­ron, a law pro­fes­sor at Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land and the author of “Hate Crimes in Cyber­space.” “It is being increas­ing­ly used by young peo­ple in a real­ly intim­i­dat­ing and destruc­tive way.”

    Col­leges are large­ly pow­er­less to deal with the hav­oc Yik Yak is wreak­ing. The app’s pri­va­cy pol­i­cy pre­vents schools from iden­ti­fy­ing users with­out a sub­poe­na, court order or search war­rant, or an emer­gency request from a law-enforce­ment offi­cial with a com­pelling claim of immi­nent harm. Schools can block access to Yik Yak on their Wi-Fi net­works, but ban­ning a pop­u­lar social media net­work is con­tro­ver­sial in its own right, arguably tan­ta­mount to cur­tail­ing free­dom of speech. And as a prac­ti­cal mat­ter, it doesn’t work any­way. Stu­dents can still use the app on their phones with their cell ser­vice.

    Yik Yak was cre­at­ed in late 2013 by Tyler Droll and Brooks Buff­in­g­ton, fra­ter­ni­ty broth­ers who had recent­ly grad­u­at­ed from Fur­man Uni­ver­si­ty in South Car­oli­na. Mr. Droll majored in infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy and Mr. Buff­in­g­ton in account­ing. Both 24, they came up with the idea after real­iz­ing that there were only a hand­ful of pop­u­lar Twit­ter accounts at Fur­man, almost all belong­ing to promi­nent stu­dents, like ath­letes. With Yik Yak, they say, they hoped to cre­ate a more demo­c­ra­t­ic social media net­work, one where users didn’t need a large num­ber of fol­low­ers or friends to have their posts read wide­ly.

    “We thought, ‘Why can’t we lev­el the play­ing field and con­nect every­one?’ ” said Mr. Droll, who with­drew from med­ical school a week before class­es start­ed to focus on the app.

    “When we made this app, we real­ly made it for the dis­en­fran­chised,” Mr. Buff­in­g­ton added.

    ...

    The Yik Yak app is free. Like many tech start-ups, the com­pa­ny, based in Atlanta, doesn’t gen­er­ate any rev­enue. Attract­ing adver­tis­ers could pose a chal­lenge, giv­en the nature of some of the app’s con­tent. For now, though, Mr. Droll and Mr. Buff­in­g­ton are focused on extend­ing Yik Yak’s reach by expand­ing over­seas and mov­ing beyond the col­lege mar­ket, much as Face­book did.

    Yik Yak’s pop­u­lar­i­ty among col­lege stu­dents is part of a broad­er reac­tion against more tra­di­tion­al social media sites like Face­book, which can encour­age pub­lic pos­tur­ing at the expense of hon­esty and authen­tic­i­ty.

    “Share your thoughts with peo­ple around you while keep­ing your pri­va­cy,” Yik Yak’s home page says. It is an attrac­tive con­cept to a gen­er­a­tion of smart­phone users who grew up in an era of social media — and are thus inclined to share — but who have also been warned repeat­ed­ly about the per­ma­nence of their dig­i­tal foot­print.

    In a sense, Yik Yak is a descen­dant of Juicy­Cam­pus, an anony­mous online col­lege mes­sage board that enjoyed a brief peri­od of pop­u­lar­i­ty sev­er­al years ago. Matt Ivester, who found­ed Juicy­Cam­pus in 2007 and shut it in 2009 after it became a hotbed of gos­sip and cru­el­ty, is skep­ti­cal of the claim that Yik Yak does much more than allow col­lege stu­dents to say what­ev­er they want, pub­licly and with impuni­ty. “You can pre­tend that it is serv­ing an impor­tant role on col­lege cam­pus­es, but you can’t pre­tend that it’s not upset­ting a lot of peo­ple and doing a lot of dam­age,” he said. “When I start­ed Juicy­Cam­pus, cyber­bul­ly­ing wasn’t even a word in our ver­nac­u­lar. But these guys should know bet­ter.”

    Yik Yak’s founders say the app’s overnight suc­cess left them unpre­pared for some of the prob­lems that have arisen since its intro­duc­tion. In response to com­plaints, they have made some changes to their prod­uct, for instance, adding fil­ters to pre­vent full names from being post­ed. Cer­tain key­words, like “Jew­ish,” or “bomb,” prompt this mes­sage: “Pump the brakes, this yak may con­tain threat­en­ing lan­guage. Now it’s prob­a­bly noth­ing and you’re prob­a­bly an awe­some per­son but just know that Yik Yak and law enforce­ment take threats seri­ous­ly. So you tell us, is this yak cool to post?”

    In cas­es involv­ing threats of mass vio­lence, Yik Yak has coop­er­at­ed with author­i­ties. Most recent­ly, in Novem­ber, local police traced the source of a yak — “I’m gonna [gun emo­ji] the school at 12:15 p.m. today” — to a dorm room at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty. The author, Matthew Mullen, a fresh­man, was arrest­ed with­in two hours and plead­ed guilty to mak­ing a false report or ter­ror­ist threat. He was spared jail time but sen­tenced to two years’ pro­ba­tion and ordered to pay $800 to cov­er costs con­nect­ed to the inves­ti­ga­tion.

    In the absence of a spe­cif­ic, action­able threat, though, Yik Yak zeal­ous­ly pro­tects the iden­ti­ties of its users. The respon­si­bil­i­ty lies with the app’s var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties to police them­selves by “upvot­ing” or “down­vot­ing” posts. If a yak receives a score of neg­a­tive 5, it is removed. “Real­ly, what it comes down to is that we try to empow­er the com­mu­ni­ties as much as we can,” Mr. Droll said.

    When Yik Yak appeared, it quick­ly spread across high schools and mid­dle schools, too, where the prob­lems were even more ram­pant. After a rash of com­plaints last win­ter at a num­ber of schools in Chica­go, Mr. Droll and Mr. Buff­in­g­ton dis­abled the app through­out the city. They say they have since built vir­tu­al fences — or “geo-fences” — around about 90 per­cent of the nation’s high schools and mid­dle schools. Unlike bar­ring Yik Yak from a Wi-Fi net­work, which has proved inef­fec­tive in lim­it­ing its use, these fences actu­al­ly make it impos­si­ble to open the app on school grounds. Mr. Droll and Mr. Buff­in­g­ton also changed Yik Yak’s age rat­ing in the App Store from 12 and over to 17 and over.

    Toward the end of last school year, almost every stu­dent at Phillips Exeter Acad­e­my in New Hamp­shire had the app on his or her phone and checked it con­stant­ly to read the anony­mous attacks on fel­low stu­dents, fac­ul­ty mem­bers and deans.

    “Please stop using Yik Yak imme­di­ate­ly,” Arthur Cos­grove, the dean of res­i­den­tial life, wrote in an email to the stu­dent body. “Remove it from your phones. It is doing us no good.”

    At Exeter’s request, the com­pa­ny built a geo-fence around the school, but it cov­ered only a few build­ings. Stu­dents con­tin­ued using the app on dif­fer­ent parts of the sprawl­ing cam­pus.

    As we can see, Yik Yak does indeed have iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion on its users, it just won’t share it unless there’s a sub­poe­na or com­pelling claim of immi­nent harm from law enforce­ment. So it’s users aren’t actu­al­ly anony­mous. They’re just anony­mous to every­one except Yik Yak:

    ...
    Col­leges are large­ly pow­er­less to deal with the hav­oc Yik Yak is wreak­ing. The app’s pri­va­cy pol­i­cy pre­vents schools from iden­ti­fy­ing users with­out a sub­poe­na, court order or search war­rant, or an emer­gency request from a law-enforce­ment offi­cial with a com­pelling claim of immi­nent harm. Schools can block access to Yik Yak on their Wi-Fi net­works, but ban­ning a pop­u­lar social media net­work is con­tro­ver­sial in its own right, arguably tan­ta­mount to cur­tail­ing free­dom of speech. And as a prac­ti­cal mat­ter, it doesn’t work any­way. Stu­dents can still use the app on their phones with their cell ser­vice.

    ...

    In cas­es involv­ing threats of mass vio­lence, Yik Yak has coop­er­at­ed with author­i­ties. Most recent­ly, in Novem­ber, local police traced the source of a yak — “I’m gonna [gun emo­ji] the school at 12:15 p.m. today” — to a dorm room at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty. The author, Matthew Mullen, a fresh­man, was arrest­ed with­in two hours and plead­ed guilty to mak­ing a false report or ter­ror­ist threat. He was spared jail time but sen­tenced to two years’ pro­ba­tion and ordered to pay $800 to cov­er costs con­nect­ed to the inves­ti­ga­tion.

    In the absence of a spe­cif­ic, action­able threat, though, Yik Yak zeal­ous­ly pro­tects the iden­ti­ties of its users. The respon­si­bil­i­ty lies with the app’s var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties to police them­selves by “upvot­ing” or “down­vot­ing” posts. If a yak receives a score of neg­a­tive 5, it is removed. “Real­ly, what it comes down to is that we try to empow­er the com­mu­ni­ties as much as we can,” Mr. Droll said.

    ...

    And that all rais­es an inter­est­ing ques­tion about Yik Yak’s rather ques­tion­able busi­ness mod­el: Yik Yak was val­ued at $200–300 mil­lion, and yet it’s free, does­n’t gen­er­ate any rev­enue, and the only obvi­ous rev­enue source is adver­tis­ing which could be tricky since a lot of com­pa­nies might not want to adver­tise on a smear-ped­dling plat­form known for online har­rass­ment:

    ...
    The Yik Yak app is free. Like many tech start-ups, the com­pa­ny, based in Atlanta, doesn’t gen­er­ate any rev­enue. Attract­ing adver­tis­ers could pose a chal­lenge, giv­en the nature of some of the app’s con­tent. For now, though, Mr. Droll and Mr. Buff­in­g­ton are focused on extend­ing Yik Yak’s reach by expand­ing over­seas and mov­ing beyond the col­lege mar­ket, much as Face­book did.
    ...

    So...since Yik Yak obvi­ous can iden­ti­fy users in an emer­gency, but sim­ply choos­es not to under all oth­er cir­cum­stance, you have to won­der if the high val­u­a­tion for a com­pa­ny that not only isn’t turn­ing a prof­it but actu­al­ly has no rev­enue might have some­thing to do with the fact that large num­bers of peo­ple are using a ser­vice that they assume to be anony­mous but is actu­al­ly able to iden­ti­fy their devices along with user loca­tion data. Could that be part of the planned busi­ness mod­el? It seems pos­si­ble.

    It’s one of the many ques­tions raised by the wave of new anonymi­ty apps (that aren’t very new, con­cep­tu­al­ly, nor very anony­mous) that’s sweep­ing the social net­work­ing world. One of many.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 11, 2015, 3:55 pm
  5. With Mark Zucker­berg and his wife pledg­ing to donate 99 per­cent of their net worth to a char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to a vari­ety of phil­an­thropic goals, a num­ber of com­menters have point out that it’s both pathet­ic that soci­ety even needs the largess of bil­lion­aires to attempt to solve press­ing glob­al issues and rather alarm­ing giv­en the per­sis­tent real­i­ty that bil­lion­aires tend to have rather skewed view of how the world should work.

    But it’s also worth point­ing out that Zucker­berg’s mas­sive char­i­ta­ble con­tri­bu­tion was­n’t actu­al­ly a char­i­ta­ble con­tri­bu­tion:

    The New York Times
    The Trade

    How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altru­ism Helps Him­self

    By JESSE EISINGER
    DEC. 3, 2015

    Mark Zucker­berg did not donate $45 bil­lion to char­i­ty. You may have heard that, but that was wrong.

    Here’s what hap­pened instead: Mr. Zucker­berg cre­at­ed an invest­ment vehi­cle.

    Sor­ry for the slight­ly less sexy head­line.

    Mr. Zucker­berg is a co-founder of Face­book and a youth­ful mega-bil­lion­aire. In announc­ing the birth of his daugh­ter, he and his wife, Priscil­la Chan, declared they would donate 99 per­cent of their worth, the vast major­i­ty of which is tied up in Face­book stock val­ued at $45 bil­lion today.

    In doing so, Mr. Zucker­berg and Ms. Chan did not set up a char­i­ta­ble foun­da­tion, which has non­prof­it sta­tus. He cre­at­ed a lim­it­ed lia­bil­i­ty com­pa­ny, one that has already reaped enor­mous ben­e­fits as pub­lic rela­tions coup for him­self. His P.R. return-on-invest­ment dwarfs that of his Face­book stock. Mr. Zucker­berg was depict­ed in breath­less, glow­ing terms for hav­ing, in essence, moved mon­ey from one pock­et to the oth­er.

    An L.L.C. can invest in for-prof­it com­pa­nies (per­haps these will be char­ac­ter­ized as soci­etal­ly respon­si­ble com­pa­nies, but lots of com­pa­nies claim the man­tle of soci­etal respon­si­bil­i­ty). An L.L.C. can make polit­i­cal dona­tions. It can lob­by for changes in the law. He remains com­plete­ly free to do as he wish­es with his mon­ey. That’s what Amer­i­ca is all about. But as a soci­ety, we don’t gen­er­al­ly call these types of activ­i­ties “char­i­ty.”

    What’s more, a char­i­ta­ble foun­da­tion is sub­ject to rules and over­sight. It has to allo­cate a cer­tain per­cent­age of its assets every year. The new Zucker­berg L.L.C. won’t be sub­ject to those rules and won’t have any trans­paren­cy require­ments.

    In cov­er­ing the event, many com­men­ta­tors praised the size and per­cent­age of the gift and point­ed out that Mr. Zucker­berg is rel­a­tive­ly young to be plan­ning to give his wealth away. “Mark Zucker­berg Phil­an­thropy Pledge Sets New Giv­ing Stan­dard,” Bloomberg glowed. Few news out­lets ini­tial­ly con­sid­ered the tax impli­ca­tions of Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan. A Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle didn’t men­tion tax­es at all.

    Nor did they grap­ple with the soci­etal impli­ca­tions of the would-be dona­tions.

    So what are the tax impli­ca­tions? They are quite gen­er­ous to Mr. Zucker­berg. I asked Vic­tor Fleis­ch­er, a law pro­fes­sor and tax spe­cial­ist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Diego School of Law, as well as a con­trib­u­tor to Deal­Book. He explained that if the L.L.C. sold stock, Mr. Zucker­berg would pay a hefty cap­i­tal gains tax, par­tic­u­lar­ly if Face­book stock kept climb­ing.

    If the L.L.C. donat­ed to a char­i­ty, he would get a deduc­tion just like any­one else. That’s a nice lit­tle bonus. But the L.L.C. prob­a­bly won’t do that because it can do bet­ter. The savvi­er move, Pro­fes­sor Fleis­ch­er explained, would be to have the L.L.C. donate the appre­ci­at­ed shares to char­i­ty, which would gen­er­ate a deduc­tion at fair mar­ket val­ue of the stock with­out trig­ger­ing any tax.

    Mr. Zucker­berg didn’t cre­ate these tax laws and can­not be crit­i­cized for min­i­miz­ing his tax bills. If he had cre­at­ed a foun­da­tion, he would have accrued sim­i­lar tax ben­e­fits. But what this means is that he amassed one of the great­est for­tunes in the world — and is like­ly nev­er to pay any tax­es on it. Any time a super­wealthy plu­to­crat makes a char­i­ta­ble dona­tion, the pub­lic ought to be remind­ed that this is how our tax sys­tem works. The super­wealthy buy great pub­lic rela­tions and adu­la­tion for dona­tions that min­i­mize their tax­es.

    Instead of lav­ish­ing praise on Mr. Zucker­berg for hav­ing issued a news release with a promise, this should be an occa­sion to mull what kind of soci­ety we want to live in. Who should fund our gen­er­al soci­etal needs and how? Char­i­ties rarely fund quo­tid­i­an yet vital needs. What would $40 bil­lion mean for job cre­ation or infra­struc­ture spend­ing? The Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion has a bud­get of about $7 bil­lion. Maybe more should go to that. Soci­ety, through its elect­ed mem­bers, tax­es its mem­bers. Then the elect­ed offi­cials decide what to do with sums of mon­ey.

    In this case, it is dif­fer­ent. One per­son will be mak­ing these deci­sions.

    Of course, nobody thinks our gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives do a good job of allo­cat­ing resources. Politi­cians — a bunch of bums! Maybe Mr. Zucker­berg will make won­der­ful deci­sions, ones I would per­son­al­ly be hap­py with. Maybe not. He blew his $100 mil­lion dona­tion to the Newark school sys­tem, as Dale Rus­sakoff detailed in her recent book, “The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?” Mr. Zucker­berg has said he has learned from his mis­takes. We don’t know whether that’s true because he hasn’t made any deci­sions with the mon­ey he plans to put into his invest­ment vehi­cle.

    ...

    Mega-dona­tions, assum­ing Mr. Zucker­berg makes good on his pledge, are explic­it acknowl­edg­ments that the mon­ey should be plowed back into soci­ety. They are tac­it acknowl­edg­ments that no one could ever pos­si­bly spend $45 bil­lion on him­self or his fam­i­ly, and that the mon­ey isn’t real­ly “his,” in a fun­da­men­tal sense. Because that is the case, soci­ety can’t rely on the benef­i­cence and enlight­en­ment of the super­wealthy to real­ize this indi­vid­u­al­ly. We need to take a por­tion uni­form­ly — some kind of tax on wealth.

    The point is that we are turn­ing into a soci­ety of oli­garchs. And I am not as excit­ed as some to wel­come the new Sil­i­con Val­ley over­lords.

    “Any time a super­wealthy plu­to­crat makes a char­i­ta­ble dona­tion, the pub­lic ought to be remind­ed that this is how our tax sys­tem works. The super­wealthy buy great pub­lic rela­tions and adu­la­tion for dona­tions that min­i­mize their tax­es.”
    Yep. And those dona­tions don’t just min­i­mize bil­lion­aires’ tax­es. They also max­i­mize their influ­ence. It’s also worth remind­ing our selves that, when it comes to Lib­er­tar­i­an oli­garchs, what they con­sid­er “help” can be pret­ty harm­ful. We’ll see which path Zucker­berg takes on his quest to help the mass­es. We’ll see...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 3, 2015, 3:18 pm
  6. Won­der­ful. The pow­er of facial recog­ni­tion soft­ware can now be in the palm of your hand...scan­ning your phone’s pho­tos for Face­book:

    The Verge
    Face­book Mes­sen­ger now lets you cus­tomize col­ors and emo­ji for every chat

    Pho­to Mag­ic shar­ing is now rolling out to all users

    By Chris Welch on Decem­ber 17, 2015 01:20 pm

    Face­book’s try­ing to squeeze some use­ful new fea­tures into Mes­sen­ger before 2015 comes to a close. Today the com­pa­ny announced that Pho­to Mag­ic, which uses facial recog­ni­tion to sim­pli­fy the process of shar­ing pho­tos with your friends, is rolling out wide­ly to users every­where. Give the app per­mis­sion to access your pho­tos, and it’ll auto­mat­i­cal­ly offer to send the pic­ture to any Face­book friends iden­ti­fied as being in the shot.

    It’s a big help if you’re some­one who con­stant­ly for­gets to send pho­tos around after a par­ty, fam­i­ly event, or night out — and Face­book says there’s no time more pop­u­lar for pic­ture shar­ing than the hol­i­days. Instead of mak­ing you thumb through your phone’s cam­era roll, Face­book is now han­dling the grunt work, rec­og­niz­ing which of your friends are in the frame and let­ting you share those pic­tures with a sin­gle tap. Pho­to Mag­ic can be turned off if you get tired of the shar­ing rec­om­men­da­tions or just don’t want Face­book ana­lyz­ing your pic­tures.

    ...

    Nice. So now the new facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy that was pre­vi­ous­ly only avail­able in Aus­tralia is get­ting auto­mat­i­cal­ly added to mobile Face­book app users every­where...except Cana­da and the EU.

    And if the facial recog­ni­tion func­tion­al­i­ty of “Pho­to Mag­ic” sounds famil­iar for Face­book users, it might be because it’s basi­cal­ly the same way as “Moment”, a new stand-alone Face­book app that also fea­tures the facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy

    The Verge
    Face­book Mes­sen­ger adds fast pho­to shar­ing using face recog­ni­tion

    A new way to res­cue for­got­ten pho­tos from the cam­era roll

    By Casey New­ton on Novem­ber 9, 2015 03:00 pm

    As Face­book Mes­sen­ger has zoomed to 700 mil­lion month­ly users, it has become a pop­u­lar way for peo­ple to share pho­tos with your friends. Mes­sen­ger users col­lec­tive­ly send one anoth­er 9.5 bil­lion pic­tures a month, and that num­ber is grow­ing faster than the over­all rate of mes­sag­ing. That led Face­book to con­sid­er ways to enhance pho­to shar­ing on Mes­sen­ger — and today it begins to arrive in the form of (deep sigh) Pho­to Mag­ic, which mon­i­tors your cam­era roll and sends you noti­fi­ca­tions when it rec­og­nizes one or more of your friends ask­ing if you’d like to send it to them. The fea­ture is rolling out in Aus­tralia today on Android, with iOS to fol­low a few days lat­er. It is expect­ed to come to more coun­tries in com­ing months.

    Pho­to Mag­ic (groan), which you have to opt into to use, is meant to solve a fun­da­men­tal prob­lem of the smart­phone cam­era age: you like­ly have hun­dreds of pho­tos of friends sit­ting inside your cam­era roll, and despite your best inten­tions, you’ll like­ly nev­er take the time to pick them out and send them to your friends. Peter Mar­ti­nazzi, a direc­tor of prod­uct man­age­ment on Mes­sen­ger, told me he found him­self in this posi­tion after Hal­loween, when his cam­era roll filled up with pho­tos of his friends in cos­tume. Now, instead of let­ting them lan­guish, he can use Mes­sen­ger to get the pic­tures to their intend­ed recip­i­ents.

    Here’s how it works. The first time you try the updat­ed app, Mes­sen­ger will look for the most recent pho­to in your cam­era roll that includes one of your Face­book friends. (You’ll have to give it per­mis­sion to access your pho­tos.) Once it finds a pic­ture, you can send it to the recip­i­ent with one tap. If mul­ti­ple friends are in the pho­to, it will cre­ate a new mes­sage thread with you and those friends. The next time you take a pic­ture of one of your Face­book friends, you’ll get a noti­fi­ca­tion sug­gest­ing you share it with them.

    If this sounds famil­iar, it’s because it’s the same basic idea as Moments, a stand-alone app that Face­book launched ear­li­er this year. (The Mes­sen­ger and Moments teams col­lab­o­rat­ed on Pho­to Mag­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly around the face recog­ni­tion ele­ments.) Moments works the same way, but there’s a catch: friends needs to have Moments installed in order to view the pho­tos you send them. I like Moments a lot, but very few of my friends have it installed — and so I resist shar­ing pho­tos using Moments, because I don’t want to feel like I’m spam­ming them with app down­load links.

    ...

    “If this sounds famil­iar, it’s because it’s the same basic idea as Moments, a stand-alone app that Face­book launched ear­li­er this year. (The Mes­sen­ger and Moments teams col­lab­o­rat­ed on Pho­to Mag­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly around the face recog­ni­tion ele­ments.) Moments works the same way, but there’s a catch: friends needs to have Moments installed in order to view the pho­tos you send them. I like Moments a lot, but very few of my friends have it installed — and so I resist shar­ing pho­tos using Moments, because I don’t want to feel like I’m spam­ming them with app down­load links.”

    Yep, now that Face­book’s Pho­to Mag­ic is get­ting rolled out to most of the world as part of Face­book Mes­sen­ger , Face­book’s facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy that scrolls through your smart phone pho­tos can get adopt­ed at a much high­er rate since it pre­sum­ably won’t suf­fer from the same “we both need to have it” issue that’s hold­ing adop­tion of Moment back.

    But while Pho­to Mag­ic will sort of be com­pet­ing with Moment for Face­book’s facial recog­ni­tion ser­vices don’t assumes that Momen­t’s moment has already passed:

    PC World

    Face­book’s killing pho­to sync and push­ing users to ded­i­cat­ed Moments app
    Pri­vate pho­to shar­ing is get­ting its moment in the sun

    Jared New­man

    Dec 14, 2015 9:50 AM

    Face­book is shut­ting down pho­to sync in its mobile apps, and is ask­ing users to try the stand­alone Moments app instead.

    Pho­to sync arrived on Face­book a few years ago, let­ting users auto­mat­i­cal­ly upload pho­tos from their phones’ cam­era rolls. Those pho­tos were stored pri­vate­ly by default, and users could then choose which ones to share on the social net­work.

    But on Jan­u­ary 10, that fea­ture will go away, TechCrunch reports. Users will have to down­load Moments if they want to keep sync­ing their pho­tos, while exist­ing synced pho­tos will appear in the Moments app auto­mat­i­cal­ly. Face­book has start­ed show­ing pop-up noti­fi­ca­tions and splash pages to alert users to the change. (Users who’d rather not switch will be able to down­load their synced pho­tos in a zip file and delete them from the net­work.)

    Com­pared to pho­to sync, Moments puts a greater empha­sis on pri­vate shar­ing. With some help from facial recog­ni­tion, Face­book users can tag pho­tos of their friends, who can then sync those pho­tos to their own col­lec­tions. It’s meant to solve the prob­lem of get­ting a hold of pho­tos you didn’t take, with­out hav­ing to go through email or even Face­book prop­er.

    As TechCrunch points out, Europe’s tighter pri­va­cy restric­tions on facial recog­ni­tion have pre­vent­ed Face­book from releas­ing Moments there. It’s like­ly that pho­to sync will live on in regions where Moments is unavail­able.

    Why this mat­ters: The focus on Moments puts Face­book in a bet­ter posi­tion to com­pete with Google, whose own Google Pho­tos ser­vice just added a way to share and sync pri­vate albums. Although Google still has the edge in pho­to quality—users can store full-size or com­pressed pho­tos, while Face­book reduces all pho­tos to as lit­tle as 720 pix­els wide—Face­book has the advan­tage of tying into your exist­ing net­work of friends. Either way, expect com­pe­ti­tion to inten­si­fy as the two firms fight for pri­vate pho­to shar­ing dom­i­nance.

    “The focus on Moments puts Face­book in a bet­ter posi­tion to com­pete with Google, whose own Google Pho­tos ser­vice just added a way to share and sync pri­vate albums
    Yep, Moment is Face­book’s answer to Google Pho­tos ser­vice. Will facial recog­ni­tion give it an edge over Google? That’s hard to say.

    At least opt­ing out of ser­vices that allow third-par­ty mega cor­po­ra­tions hell-bent on com­mer­cial­iz­ing as much per­son­al data on all of us as pos­si­ble scan our smart­phone pics is still an option. For now.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | December 17, 2015, 1:44 pm

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